The Year's Best Science Fiction 16th Annual Collection

The Year's Best Science Fiction Sixteenth Annual Collection Edited by Gardner Dozois

St. Martin's Griffin New York

ALSO BY GARDNER DOZOIS ANTHOLOGIES A DAY IN THE LIFE ANOTHER WORLD BEST SCIENCE FICTION STORIES OF THE YEAR #6-10 THE BEST OF ISAAC ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE TIME-TRAVELLERS FROM ISAAC ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE TRANSCENDENTAL TALES FROM ISAAC ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE ISAAC ASIMOV'S ALIENS ISAAC ASIMOV'S MARS ISAAC ASIMOV'S SF LITE ISAAC ASIMOV'S WAR ISAAC ASIMOV'S PLANET EARTH (WITH SHEILA WILLIAMS) ISAAC ASIMOV'S ROBOTS (WITH SHEILA WILLIAMS) ISAAC ASIMOV'S CYBERDREAMS (WITH SHEILA WILLIAMS) ISAAC ASIMOV'S VALENTINES (WITH SHEILA WILLIAMS) ISAAC ASIMOV'S SKIN DEEP (WITH SHEILA WILLIAMS) ISAAC ASIMOV'S GHOSTS (WITH SHEILA WILLIAMS) ISAAC ASIMOV'S DETECTIVES (WITH SHEILA WILLIAMS) ISAAC ASIMOV'S VAMPIRES (WITH SHEILA WILLIAMS) ISAAC ASIMOV'S MOONS (WITH SHEILA WILLIAMS) ISAAC ASIMOV'S CHRISTMAS (WITH SHEILA WILLIAMS) ISAAC ASIMOV'S CAMELOT (WITH SHEILA WILLIAMS) ROADS NOT TAKEN (WITH STANLEY SCHMIDT) THE YEAR'S BEST SCIENCE FICTION, #1-15 FUTURE EARTHS: UNDER AFRICAN SKIES (WITH MIKE RESNICK)

FUTURE EARTHS: UNDER SOUTH AMERICAN SKIES (WITH MIKE RESNICK) FUTURE POWER (WITH JACK DANN) ALIENS! (WITH JACK DANN) UNICORNS! (WITH JACK DANN) MAGICATS! (WITH JACK DANN) MAGICATS 2 (WITH JACK DANN) BESTIARY! (WITH JACK DANN) MERMAIDS! (WITH JACK DANN) SORCERERS! (WITH JACK DANN) DEMONS! (WITH JACK DANN) DOGTALES! (WITH JACK DANN) RIPPER! (WITH SUSAN CASPER) SEASERPENTS! (WITH JACK DANN) DINOSAURS! (WITH JACK DANN) LITTLE PEOPLE! (WITH JACK DANN) DRAGONS! (WITH JACK DANN) HORSES! (WITH JACK DANN) UNICORNS 2 (WITH JACK DANN) INVADERS! (WITH JACK DANN) ANGELS! (WITH JACK DANN) DINOSAURS II (WITH JACK DANN) HACKERS (WITH JACK DANN) TIMEGATES (WITH JACK DANN) CLONES (WITH JACK DANN) NANOTECH (WITH JACK DANN) IMMORTALS (WITH JACK DANN) MODERN CLASSICS OF SCIENCE FICTION MODERN CLASSIC SHORT NOVELS OF SCIENCE FICTION MODERN CLASSICS OF FANTASY KILLING ME SOFTLY DYING FOR IT THE GOOD OLD STUFF THE GOOD NEW STUFF FICTION STRANGERS THE VISIBLE MAN (COLLECTION) NIGHTMARE BLUE (WITH GEORGE ALEC EFFINGER) SLOW DANCING THROUGH TIME (WITH JACK DANN, MICHAEL SWANWICK, SUSAN CASPER, AND JACK C. HALDEMAN II) THE PEACEMAKER GEODESIC DREAMS (COLLECTION) NONFICTION THE FICTION OF JAMES TIPTREE, JR.

For the Gibsons: Shari, Jimmy, Jared, Steven, and Melissa.

THE YEAR'S BEST SCIENCE FICTION: SIXTEENTH ANNUAL COLLECTION. Copyright © 1999 by Gardner Dozois. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010. ISBN 0-312-26474-7

Electronic format made available by arrangement with St. Martin's Griffin

peanutpress.com, Inc. www.peanutpress.com

acknowledgment is made for permission to print the following material: "Oceanic," by Greg Egan. Copyright © 1998 by Dell Magazines. First published in Asimov's Science Fiction, August 1998. Reprinted by permission of the author. "Approaching Perimelasma," by Geoffrey A. Landis. Copyright © 1998 by Dell Magazines. First published in Asimov's Science Fiction, January 1998. Reprinted by permission of the author. "Craphound," by Cory Doctorow. Copyright © 1998 by Cory Doctorow. First published in Science Fiction Age, March 1998. Reprinted by permission of the author. "Jedella Ghost," by Tanith Lee. Copyright © 1998 by Interzone. First published in Interzone, September 1998. Reprinted by permission of the author. "Taklamakan," by Bruce Sterling. Copyright © 1998 by Dell Magazines. First published in Asimov's Science Fiction, October/November 1998. Reprinted by permission of the author. "The Island of the Immortals," by Ursula K. Le Guin. Copyright © 1998 by Wizards of the Coast, Inc. First published in Amazing Stories, Fall 1998. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author's agent, the Virginia Kidd Literary Agency. "Sea Change, with Monsters," by Paul J. McAuley. Copyright © 1998 by Dell Magazines. First

published in Asimov's Science Fiction, September 1998. Reprinted by permission of the author. "Divided by Infinity," by Robert Charles Wilson. Copyright © 1998 byRobert Charles Wilson. First published in Starlight 2 (Tor). Reprinted by permission of the author. "US," by Howard Waldrop. Copyright © 1998 by Howard Waldrop. First published electronically online on Event Horizon (www.eventhorizon.com), October 1998. Reprinted by permission of the author. "The Days of Solomon Gursky," by Ian McDonald. Copyright © 1998 by Dell Magazines. First published in Asimov's Science Fiction, June 1998. Reprinted by permission of the author. "The Cuckoo's Boys," by Robert Reed. Copyright © 1998 by Robert Reed. First published in Science Fiction Age, September 1998. Reprinted by permission of the author. "The Halfway House at the Heart of Darkness," by William Browning Spencer. Copyright © 1998 by William Browning Spencer. First published in Lord of the Fantastic (Avon Eos). Reprinted by permission of the author. "The Very Pulse of the Machine," by Michael Swanwick. Copyright © 1998 by Dell Magazines. First published in Asimov's Science Fiction, February 1998. Reprinted by permission of the author. "Story of Your Life," by Ted Chiang. Copyright © 1998 by Ted Chiang. First published in Starlight 2 (Tor). Reprinted by permission of the author and the author's agent, the Virginia Kidd Literary Agency. "Voivodoi," by Liz Williams. Copyright © 1998 by Terra Incognita. First published in Terra Incognita, Summer 1998. Reprinted by permission of the author. "Saddlepoint: Roughneck" by Stephen Baxter. Copyright © 1998 by Stephen Baxter. First published in Science Fiction Age, May 1998. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author's agent, the Maggie Noach Agency. "This Side of Independence," by Rob Chilson. Copyright © 1998 by Mercury Press, Inc. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, February 1998. Reprinted by permission of the author. "Unborn Again," by Chris Lawson. Copyright © 1998 by Chris Lawson. First published in Dreaming Down-Under (HarperCollins Australia). Reprinted by permission of the author. "Grist," by Tony Daniel. Copyright © 1998 by Dell Magazines. First published in Asimov's Science Fiction, December 1998. Reprinted by permission of the author. "La Cenerentola," by Gwyneth Jones. Copyright © 1998 by Interzone. First published in Interzone, October 1998. Reprinted by permission of the author. "Down in the Dark," by William Barton. Copyright © 1998 by Dell Magazines. First published in Asimov's Science Fiction, December 1998. Reprinted by permission of the author. "Free in Asveroth," by Jim Grimsley. Copyright © 1998 by Nicola Griffith and Stephen Pagel. First published in Bending the Landscape: Science Fiction (The Overlook Press). Reprinted by permission of the author. "The Dancing Floor," by Cherry Wilder. Copyright © 1998 by Cherry Wilder. First published in Dreaming Down-Under (HarperCollins Australia). Reprinted bypermission of the author and the author's agent, James Frenkel and Associates. "The Summer Isles," by Ian R. MacLeod. Copyright © 1998 by Dell Magazines. First published in Asimov's Science Fiction, October/November 1998. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author's agent, Susan Ann Protter.

acknowledgments The editor would like to thank the following people for their help and support: first and foremost, Susan

Casper, for doing much of the thankless scut work involved in producing this anthology; Michael Swanwick, Ellen Datlow, Virginia Kidd, Jim Allen, Vaughne Lee Hansen, Sheila Williams, David Pringle, Charles C. Ryan, David G. Hartwell, Jack Dann, Janeen Webb, Warren Lapine, Jan Berriends, Ed McFadden, Tom Piccirilli, Nicola Griffith, Lawrence Person, Dwight Brown, Darrell Schweitzer, Corin See, and special thanks to my own editor, Gordon Van Gelder. Thanks are also due to Charles N. Brown, whose magazine Locus (Locus Publications, P.O. Box 13305, Oakland, CA 94661, $43 for a one-year subscription [twelve issues] via second class; credit card orders [510] 339-9198) was used as a reference source throughout the Summation, and to Andrew Porter, whose magazine Science Fiction Chronicle (Science Fiction Chronicle, P.O. Box 022730, Brooklyn, NY 11202-0056, $35 for a one-year subscription [twelve issues]; $42 first class) was also used as a reference source throughout. summation: 1998 On the surface, 1998 was a relatively quiet year, although just below that surface, major changes swum like monstrous fish, changes that could affect the entire publishing world and make it a radically different place in 2008 than it is today. It was in general a prosperous year, with the major chain bookstores reporting record earnings, and the relatively new area of online bookselling proving itself to be a serious money-maker, with online services such as Amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com bringing in serious bucks, and a great potential for growth still ahead in those areas. A good solid percentage of the money earned this year was earned by science fiction books, which I think pretty much serves to dismiss fears, discussed here last year, that the Death of Science Fiction as a publishing category is imminent. At this point, momentum and inertia alone would carry SF publishing into the next century, even if not another SF book ever sold a copy again— and, indeed, schedules into the first and second year of the new century have already been announced. But all indications are that SF (even solid core SF, leaving the much dreaded media novels out of the equation altogether) is selling better than ever here at the brink of the new millennium. The big, dramatic, catastrophic recession/bust/slump that genre insiders have been predicting for more than a decade now did not happen in 1998; in fact, the overall totals for books published seemed to be on the rise again, after a couple of years of mild decline (although the ways in which SF books get published continue to change and evolve, with mass-market titles declining and the number of books that are published instead as hardcovers or trade paperbacks on the rise). There were some fairly hefty cutbacks in 1997, and some failing or faltering lines, but they were more than made up for this year in numbers of books released by the founding of major and ambitious new science fiction lines by Avon Eos and Simon & Schuster UK. The field seems to be in good shape artistically and creatively, too; yes, the majority of the stuff available on the bookstore shelves at any given time is crap, but this has always been true, whatever decade you're talking about, whether it's the '50s, the '60s, the '70s, the '80s, or the '90s. Look beyond the crap, and you'll find an enormous and enormously varied number of top authors (from several different generations, stretching all the way from Golden Age giants of the '30s and '40s to the kid who made his first sale yesterday) producing an amazingly varied spectrum of first-rate work, from High Fantasy to the hardest of Hard Science Fiction— including a lot of material that could not have been published at all twenty years ago. There are still people around, some of them quite vocal, who will complain at length about how nobody's writing anything good anymore in the field, not like they did in the old days, but look closely and you'll find that most of those same people don't read any new science fiction, and haven't for years. Those of us who do read lots of new science fiction know better. When people are looking

back nostalgically to the Golden Age twenty years from now, this, the present, this period we're in right now, is what they'll be looking at. Like last year, there was little activity in the traditional game of Editorial Musical Chairs in 1998, with the only really significant change being that Shelley Shapiro was named Editorial Director of Del Rey Books, moving up from her former position as Executive Editor. Most of the other changes this year took place a lot farther up the food-chain, in the rarified corporate realms where the very top suits dwell. The giant German publishing conglomerate Bertelsmann, owner of Bantam Doubleday Dell, bought Random House, which includes under its corporate umbrella houses such as Del Rey, Ballantine, Knopf, and dozens of other imprints. Later in the year, Bertelsmann bought a 50 percent stake in barnesandnoble.com, the online arm of Barnes & Noble and direct head-to-head competitor with Amazon.com for the increasingly profitable online bookselling market. Viacom sold off all but the consumer division of Simon & Schuster to Pearson, the owner of Penguin and Putnam. In England, the Orion Publishing Group bought Cassell, which resulted in the merger of SF lines Gollancz and Millennium, with future SF books being published as Gollancz hardcovers and Millennium paperbacks; Jo Fletcher of Gollancz and Simon Spanton of Millennium will be the acquiring editors (with Caroline Oakley, in charge of Orion paperbacks, continuing to edit some authors)— they will report directly to Malcolm Edwards, himself a former SF editor (as is Anthony Cheetham, the head of Orion). And, late in the year, Barnes & Noble, the largest of the chain bookstores, bought Ingram, the largest book distributor. Since Ingram had been the major distributor for Amazon.com as well as for the remaining independent bookstores, news of the purchase sent shockwaves through the entire publishing industry, with the executive director of the Author's Guild, Paul Aiken, saying (as quoted in Locus), "The Godzilla of publishing is wedding the King Kong of distribution ... If I were an independent bookseller, I would be scared to death by this." Other experts downplayed this implication, suggesting that business would carry on more or less as always despite the sale. It may take a while for the effects of these changes to surface, but some of them— especially those things concerned with the online bookselling market— may be affecting the industry well into the next century. And there are other potential changes just down the road, things that could radically alter the nature of the publishing world as we know it. The field of electronic books, e-books, is just now taking its first faltering baby steps, with Tor announcing this year that they plan to offer about 100 books as e-text for the Rocket eBook via direct downloading from barnesandnoble.com; Tor has already licensed electronic versions of new and reprint titles to digital publisher Peanut Press for the 3Com PalmPilot, which are downloadable from the net (Peanut Press has a Web store at www.peanutpress.com that offers versions of books from a number of publishers that can be downloaded into the 3Com PalmPilot). Other "electronic book" systems are in development, including Millennium Reader, EveryBook, and SoftBook. I have a feeling that this market may turn out to be very significant indeed before we're too many years into the new century— taken to an extreme, it could change the face of publishing itself. Another development that could change the face of publishing forever is print-on-demand technology. Working models of such a system were demonstrated at this year's ABA. If it works as well as it's said to work, you may soon be able to walk into a bookstore that has such a system installed, and ask for, say, a copy of The Sun Also Rises, or any other book the system has on file, and it will print one out for you on the spot, indistinguishable from a regular trade product. The implications of such a system are staggering— only one such implication is that it would solve at a stroke the problem of the vanishing backlist that has plagued SF publishing throughout the last several decades, since the old mail-order backlist system more or less disappeared at the end of the '70s: if you decide that you like Poul Anderson, and you want to read some of his old stuff, like The High Crusade or The Enemy Stars, instead of waiting years for a reissue or haunting used bookstores trying to find those titles, you just go to

the print-on-demand machine and have it whomp up some copies of them for you on the spot. (Other implications, already beginning to occur to some writers and agents, affect current understanding of out-of-print and rights reversions issues; if your book is always available on a print-on-demand system, how can it ever be said to have gone out of print? And how can you ever get the rights to that book reverted to you in order to be sold again? A supposed one-time sale of a book could become a de facto to the end of time sale, unless contractual limitations are applied to the situation somehow.) Print-on-demand, if it works as well as its promoters claim it will, would also change the face of publishing by eliminating the need for huge warehouses to store large numbers of physical copies of books, eliminate the need for fleets of trucks to ship the physical copies around, and, perhaps most significant, eliminate at another stroke a great deal of the waste and inefficiency built into today's system (including the returns system that has been a crushing Old-Man-of-the-Sea on the back of the publishing industry for most of the second half of the twentieth century), saving immense amounts in paper and production costs; you would print exactly as many copies of a book as customers wanted to buy, with no need to produce five copies to sell one. Postulate a print-on-demand system able to print books downloaded directly from the Internet, and the need for many of the world's bookstores disappears as well (I think there will always be some bookstores, places for people to browse and schmooze, although there probably wouldn't need to be as many of them in any given location). This all sounds like utopian, pie-in-the-sky daydreaming, but it may not be as far off as you think. Similar technologies are already in place in many CD stores, where you can create your own CDs, mixing and matching songs as you like. Along the same lines, someday you may be able to go into a bookstore with a print-on-demand system and create your own anthology, drawing on a database of the year's stories (perhaps many of them published electronically online), selecting whatever stories you'd like for it, making anthologists like me obsolete. I suppose it's inevitable to be thinking about the future, here at the end of the twentieth century, with a new century and a new millennium looming just ahead of us. (Yes, I know that the new millennium doesn't really start in 2000, starting instead in 2001, so don't bother to write letters to me indignantly pointing this out. That's a lost cause anyway, I'm afraid— for all except a handful of stubborn purists, the new millennium will start in 2000, which is when the vast majority of the population will celebrate the change ... and I must admit that even though I know better, I'll probably feel a certain emotional frisson the first time I write "2000" as the year date on a check, after having spent a lifetime writing 19__-something instead!) For most of my life, the year 2000 was THE FUTURE, the time when the majority of science fiction stories were set, unimaginably distant. Now THE FUTURE is suddenly just a few months away, sweeping relentlessly down on us. It's tempting to try to peek into the future, to predict what's to come, as I was just doing above, but I know better than that. Just as SF writers peering at 2000 from the 1950s could have no real understanding of what 2000 would really be like, just as people peering into the oncoming new century from the end of the nineteenth century couldn't possibly have imagined the horrors and wonders and vast social changes that awaited humanity in the twentieth century, so we ourselves, almost by definition, lack the imagination and the foresight to see the as-yet unimaginable changes that lie ahead of us in the twenty-first century and beyond, things that would seem just as bizarre and impossible to us as the atomic bomb or a laptop computer, or a microchip, or penicillin, or the death camp at Dachau, or organ-transplant surgery, or a female Senator, or racially mixed schools, or Hustler magazine, or the Space Shuttle, or the Internet, or the ability to see into our own bodies with fiber-optic cameras, or the ability to speak to someone on the other side of the world would have seemed to somebody back in 1898. The future is always fundamentally unpredictable and unknowable. And in that lies perhaps our greatest

hope. *** It was another rocky year in the magazine market, although, for the first time in several years, there were a few upbeat notes, with Amazing Stories reborn and the circulation of a few of the magazines even beginning to creep up a bit for a change. Asimov's Science Fiction and Analog Science Fiction & Fact both changed their "trim size" in mid-1998, going to a new format that added a little over an inch in height and about a quarter-inch in width to each issue (leaving The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction as the only true digest-size magazine in the genre), and, as hoped, it seems to have helped with newsstand sales. Asimov's lost about 2,000 in subscriptions but more than doubled their newsstand sales, from 5,040 to 11,982, for an 11% gain in overall circulation. Analog gained about 383 in subscriptions and another 5,902 in newsstand sales, for an 11.8% gain in overall circulation; both magazines also improved their "sell-through" rate, from 29% to 52% for Asimov's, and from 32% to 51% for Analog. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction lost about 4,393 in subscriptions and another 495 in newsstand sales, for a 12.3% loss in overall circulation. Science Fiction Age lost about 4,740 in subscriptions and about another 4,462 in newsstand sales, for a 21.3% loss in overall circulation. Realms of Fantasy gained about 517 in subscriptions and about another 209 in newsstand sales, for a 1.6% gain in overall circulation. The magazine business is a strange one, and some of these figures probably look worse than they actually are. The fact is that many of these magazines, even the ones with declining circulations, may have actually increased their profitability in the last couple of years by various strategies, including adjusting their "draw" (sending fewer issues to newsstands that habitually sell less, so that fewer issues overall need to be printed and distributed in order to sell one issue, increasing the magazine's efficiency, and thereby lowering costs— and so increasing profitability), instituting cost-saving procedures in printing and physical production, and working out better targeting of "direct-mail" outlets (bookstores— where SF magazines usually sell well) as opposed to scattershot mass markets (magazine racks in supermarkets— where SF magazines usually don't sell well). Also, a lot of the subscriptions that have been lost by various magazines in recent years are Publishers Clearing House-style cut-rate stamp-sheet subscriptions, lost when many of the stamp-sheet places dropped most genre magazines awhile back; stamp-sheet subscriptions can swell your circulation rate, and make it look as though you're doing great, but since they cost more to fulfill than they actually bring in in revenue, they can be dangerous— they're part of the reason the print Omni went under, despite an annual circulation of 700,000— and an argument can be made that the genre magazines are better off without them. Although the magazine field did suffer a postage increase in early 1999, it also got a break in that paper costs, projected to rise, not only held steady but actually declined somewhat in 1998. And, of course, one of the traditional advantages that has always helped the digest magazines to survive is that they're so cheap to produce in the first place that you don't have to sell very many of them to make a profit (this is still true of the now slightly larger Asimov's and Analog, where, owing to changes in production methods and the economies that result from the parent company, Penny Press, having lots of other magazines— mostly crossword magazines— that print at the same size, the larger trim size is not significantly more expensive to produce than the old digest-size editions were). So, my cautious prediction— knock wood— is that it looks like most of the genre magazines will survive into the next century.

At the same time, it would be prudent not to underestimate the problems facing the magazine market. The dramatic contraction of the domestic distribution network that has been taking place in the last few years, with bigger distributors abruptly swallowing up the small independent distributors (one of the major reasons for precipitous circulation drops in almost all magazines, not just genre ones) continues— in 1996, there were 300 wholesale distributors; in 1999 that total is down to five, and the odds are good that it will be down to four before the year is over. There are so few distributors left that it's a buyer's market, and the surviving distributors often charge much higher fees for carrying titles or ask for greatly increased "discounts" and "cash incentives" for carrying them— because they can, basically. All of this makes it hard for low-circulation magazines without a company with deep pockets behind them (most SF magazines, basically) to get out on the newsstands effectively, and eats ever more deeply into their profit margin even when they can. Some distributors also set "subscription caps," refusing even to handle magazines with a circulation below a certain set figure, usually a higher circulation figure than that of most genre magazines. With so few distributors, fewer and fewer "sales-points" (individual newsstands) get serviced, because distributors now have such large areas to cover that they don't find it worthwhile to send trucks a long way to service a sales-point that may sell only a few magazines per month, so newsstands may not be able to get copies of genre magazines even if they want them; the loss of those one or two magazine sales per month may be negligible to big-circulation magazines like Cosmo or Playboy, but they can add up vitally for a science fiction magazine. Many newsstand managers have also become much more selective about which magazines they'll display, reducing the numbers of titles they'll put on their shelves, in some cases by as much as half; newsstands now will sometimes refuse to display magazines that fall below a certain circulation figure— again, a figure usually higher than that of most genre magazines. The net result of all this is that it's a lot harder for genre magazines to get out on as many newsstands as they used to, and— with distributors demanding ever more— a lot harder to make a profit than it used to be, even if you do get out there. As I said above, the magazine field has evolved strategies for coping with this situation, and profitability actually seems to be up at many of the magazines, even those with declining circulations, but it's not difficult to envision a hardening economic situation that would drive genre magazines off the newsstands altogether, or at least make it so expensive for them to be there that it's not worth it. This scenario is why I think it's important for the genre magazines to try to find ways to get around the potential newsstand bottleneck, to find ways to attract new subscribers even without a strong presence on the newsstand. Most SF magazines have always been subscription-driven, anyway. Being frozen out of the newsstands would hurt magazines the most by cutting them off from attracting new readers, casual newsstand browsers who might, with luck, eventually become new subscribers; without a constant flow of new suscribers, a magazine's circulation will continually dwindle as natural attrition eliminates a certain percentage of the old subscribers. Which brings us to one of the other hopeful notes struck in the magazine market in 1998: the use of the Internet as a method to do an end-run around traditional distribution channels, potentially enabling the magazines to avoid the newsstand bottleneck and attract the attention of potential new subscribers to their product even without much traditional newsstand display. Early in 1998, Internet Web sites went up for both Asimov's and Analog (Asimov's site is at http://www.asimovs.com, and Analog's is at http://www.analogsf.com, both sites sponsored by SF Site) and, after a full year of operation, the results are encouraging— not only is a small but steady flow of new subscriptions coming through these Web sites every month, but, even more significant, many of them are from heretofore untapped new audiences, particularly from other parts of the world, where interested readers have formerly found it difficult to subscribe because of the difficulty of obtaining American currency and because of other logistical problems (Asimov's, for instance, has already picked up new subscribers from Australia, Great Britain,

Russia, France, Ireland, Italy, and even the United Arab Emirites, and Analog has attracted subscribers from a similar range of countries); the availability of subscribing electronically online, with just the click of a few buttons required rather than a trip to the post office or at least a mailbox, is also proving attractive to domestic customers as well. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction now has a working Internet Web site as well (http://www.sfsite.com/fsf/), as do magazines such as Absolute Magnitude and Weird Tales (see below for more information), and it is to be hoped that this is an area that will continue to grow, helping the beleaguered genre magazines to survive into the next century. One of the year's other big stories in the professional magazine market was the rebirth of Amazing Stories, reported to have died back in 1994. As it has done several times in its seventy-year-plus existence, Amazing Stories rose from the grave one more time in 1998, after memorial services had been read for it and the mourners were already home from the wake. This time, Amazing Stories was resurrected in a full-size, full-color format by Wizards of the Coast Inc., who recently bought TSR Inc., Amazing's former owner; the editor is Kim Mohan, who was the editor of Amazing Stories in its last incarnation. The new version features media fiction as well as more traditional science fiction; the first issue, debuted at the 1998 Worldcon, had a painting of the Starship Enterprise on the cover, and in its first three issues to date, the magazine has featured several Star Trek stories, a Babylon 5 story, a Star*Drive™ story, and other media-and-gaming related stuff, including nonfiction media and gaming columns. On the other hand, the magazine has also featured some good to excellent non-media-oriented core science fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Eliot Fintushel, Uncle River, Orson Scott Card, and others, and has featured science columns by people such as Ben Bova and Gregory Benford, as well as book reviews. All of this gives the new Amazing Stories a curiously schizophrenic nature, split down the middle between two different kinds of beasts, fish on this side of the line, fowl on the other, and I wonder how the audience is going to react to this— how either of the potential audiences are going to react to this. Are the media fans who pick up the magazine looking for a good Star Trek story going to like the mainline science fiction stories that make up much of the magazine's contents? Is the media stuff going to appeal to the regular SF fans, or turn them off and drive them away from the magazine? Clearly the idea is that Amazing Stories will draw support from both audiences, but I can't help wondering if the magazine can long survive being half one thing and half another, if one kind of thing must not eventually drive the other kind of thing out of the magazine. Which audience might drive out the other will ultimately be determined by which sort of fans are actually buying the magazine. (And since Wizards of the Coast clearly thinks that it's the media fans who are going to end up paying the bills, would it be unreasonable to wonder if the media fans won't end up demanding that they get rid of all the other crap and replace it with more media fiction instead?) This is an experiment well worth keeping an eye on; if it works the way the Powers That Be behind the magazine obviously hope it will, then the new Amazing Stories may help print science fiction tap into whole new and largely untouched audiences. At the very worst, ignoring the whole media-fiction controversy, Amazing Stories will be very welcome as a new high-end market in a genre that needs all the markets it can get, and signs are that it may well prove to be a respectable player in the short-fiction market in the years to come. Most of the news about Asimov's and Analog was covered above. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction completed its second full year under new editor Gordon Van Gelder, and although the game of "guess which stories were bought by Gordon and which were inventory left behind by former editor Kristine Kathryn Rusch" still goes on, the Rusch inventory must surely be growing rather thin by now, and chances are from here on in that something that appears in the magazine was bought by Gordon. Although the magazine's circulation declined to a record low, F&SF is a magazine blessed with a very low operating overhead (basically, it's run out of the living rooms of people such as Ed Ferman and Gordon, with no office rents to pay and only minimum staff costs), and it's a pretty good bet that F&SF is still quite profitable even at its present circulation. New science columnists Pat Murphy and Paul Doherty have come in to supplement Gregory Benford, and the book reviews seem to rotate on an

irregular basis between Robert K.J. Killheffer, Michelle West, Elizabeth Hand, and Douglas E. Winter, with a review column by Charles De Lint also in most issues, and occasionally a review column by Gordon himself. Paul Di Fillipo's occasional "Plumage From Pegasus" column is a hoot, often at least as inventive and imaginative as the stories themselves (my favorite this year was the slyly amusing "Next Big Thing" column). As mentioned above, F&SF has a new Internet Web site (http: www.sfsite.com/fsf/), one of a cluster of genre-magazine sites on the SF Site's new page, Fictionhome (see below). The British magazine Interzone completed its eighth full year as a monthly publication. Circulation remained more or less steady this year, as it has for several years now, with a subscriber base of about 2,000 and newsstand/bookstore sales of another 2,000. Every year, year in and year out, Interzone publishes some of the best fiction to be found in the entire magazine market, and really deserves to be read much more widely than it is. The magazine has been almost impossible to find on newsstands in the United States, even in SF specialty bookstores, but it has recently been redesigned to a slightly smaller format that brings it more in line with other U.S. magazines such as Science Fiction Age and Realms of Fantasy, and has engaged a new U.S. distributor. Maybe those changes, with luck, will mean that this excellent magazine will be easier to find on this side of the Atlantic in 1999. Interzone does have a Web site (http://www.riviera.demon.co.uk/interzon.htm), although there's not a lot of content there— you can subscribe to the magazine there, though, which is what counts. Science Fiction Age successfully completed its sixth full year of publication. Although the overall circulation of Science Fiction Age dropped again in 1998, following drops in 1997 and 1996, the magazine has several things going for it to offset these losses— for one thing, they attract a lot of paid advertisements, far more than any other magazine in the field (with the possible exception of their sister magazine, Realms of Fantasy); for another, as part of a parent company, Sovereign Media, that also runs four other magazines, with a fifth on the way, they can take advantage of "economy of scale" savings in printing and publishing costs, and the large number of magazines gives them all a bigger "footprint" on the newsstand (i.e., the amount of rack space devoted to all of the Sovereign Media magazines helps to insure that there's a place there for Science Fiction Age). Despite record low circulation figures, Science Fiction Age's publisher states that 1998 was the magazine's most profitable year yet. Artistically, Science Fiction Age had another strong year; for the last couple of years, in fact, Science Fiction Age has been one of the most reliable sources for good fiction, particularly for good solid core science fiction, in the entire magazine market. Oddly, Science Fiction Age does not have a Web site, although you'd think that their connections with the media world, particularly the Sci-Fi Channel (which has an extensive Web site of its own) would make that a natural. Realms of Fantasy is a companion magazine to Science Fiction Age, very similar to it in format (a slick, large-size, full-color magazine with lots of ads), except devoted to fantasy rather than science fiction. They completed their fourth full year of publication in 1998. In the last few years, under the editorship of veteran magazine editor Shawna McCarthy, Realms of Fantasy has established itself as by far the best of the all-fantasy magazines, with the best of the stories from it only rivaled for sophistication and eclecticism by the best of the fantasy stories published by The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Asimov's Science Fiction. (The other two fantasy magazines, the much longer established Marion Zimmer Bradley's Fantasy Magazine— in its tenth year of publication in 1998— and Weird Tales are much more erratic and undependable in literary quality and consistency.) Realms of Fantasy also does not have a Web site. As usual, short SF and fantasy also appeared in many magazines outside genre boundaries, from The New Yorker to Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine to Playboy. (Subscription addresses follow for those magazines hardest to find on the newsstands: The Magazine of

Fantasy & Science Fiction, Mercury Press, Inc., 143 Cream Hill Road, West Cornwall, CT, 06796, annual subscription— $33.97 in U.S.; Asimov's Science Fiction, Dell Magazines, P.O. Box 54033, Boulder, CO 80322-4033— $33.97 for annual subscription in U.S.; Analog, Dell Magazines, P.O. Box 54625, Boulder, CO 80323— $33.97 for annual subscription in U.S.; Interzone, 217 Preston Drove, Brighton BN1 6FL, United Kingdom, $60.00 for an airmail one year— twelve issues— subscription. Note that many of these magazines can also be subscribed to electronically online, at their various Web sites.) With all of the problems— especially rising production costs— threatening the magazine market (and perhaps ultimately all of publishing in general), many cyber-geeks have been insisting for the last few years that the future of fiction publishing, especially short-fiction publishing, lies in the online world, where "online electronic magazines" can be "published" without having to worry about escalating paper and production costs, and can be "delivered" right into the homes of the consumers without having to use outdated physical distribution systems as middlemen. What nobody has yet figured out is how you can reliably make money doing this, and therein lies the rub. To date, although the promise of "online electronic publication" remains large, it also largely remains a promise that is as yet unfulfilled. So far, in fact, the track record for such "electronic magazines" or "e-zines" is not very good. In the last few years, magazines such as Omni and Tomorrow have fled the troubled print magazine world for the supposed refuge of electronic publishing, but, in those cases, the refuge proved to be illusionary. Omni abandoned their print edition and instead established the Omni Online Internet Web site, but that died early in 1998 after a couple of years of operation (although it's hard to say whether it died because it wasn't bringing in enough money or, as some of the people involved with running the site insist, because the top brass at General Media lost interest in supporting it after the death of publisher Kathy Keeton, who had been the real driving force behind Omni's migration into the online world). Tomorrow magazine also abandoned its print edition and reinvented itself as an Internet e-zine called Tomorrow SF. Last year, I reported that Tomorrow SF was in the process of carrying out an interesting experiment, where, after "publishing" the first three online issues of Tomorrow SF for free, they had begun charging a "subscription fee" for access to the Web site, hoping that the audience would have been hooked enough by the free samples that they would continue to want the stuff enough to actually pay for it. Unfortunately, this experiment seems to have been a failure, which may raise doubts about the viability of the whole "e-zine" concept, since Tomorrow SF abruptly gave up its e-zine format in mid-1998. The Tomorrow SF site still exists (http://www.tomorrowsf.com), but it has switched over to being an archive site for reprint stories by editor Algis Budrys, rather than an ongoing "magazine" that publishes new stories by other hands. The blunt fact is that there are not really that many good, professional-level science fiction stories being published online at the moment (at least original stories, stories that are making their initial "appearance" online; there are a fairly large number of good reprint stories archived here and there around the Internet, on one site or another). Cyber-optimists insist that this will soon change dramatically— and they may even be right. At the moment, though, most publishers seem to be using their Web sites for pushing a physical product, selling subscriptions to print magazines and advertising forthcoming books, rather than using them as places to print original fiction online in electronic format. There are exceptions, though. When the plug was pulled on Omni Online, the indomitable Ellen Datlow, fiction editor of Omni Online and, before that, longtime fiction editor of the print Omni, got together with Robert K. J. Killheffer, former editor of Century magazine, and a few other people, and launched a new Internet Web site and

e-zine, Event Horizon (http://www.eventhorizon.com/eventhorizon), which started operation in mid-1998, and which has already become, as was Omni Online before it, perhaps your best bet for finding good professional-quality original science fiction, fantasy, and horror stories published in electronic format on the Internet. Since going up, Event Horizon has published good work by Howard Waldrop (a story which is reprinted in this anthology for the first time ever in print format, having "appeared" before that only as phosphor dots on a screen), Terry Dowling, Kelly Link, K. W. Jeter, Michaela Roessner, and others, reprints by Robert Silverberg, Carter Scholz, and Pat Cadigan, and "round-robin" stories (written by four authors in collaboration, each writing a section in term) by authors such as Gwyneth Jones, Susan Casper, Scott Baker, Garry Kilworth, and others. Event Horizon also features reviews and other nonfiction pieces, regular columns by Barry N. Malzberg and Lucius Shepard, and hosts regularly scheduled live interactive interviews or "chats" with various prominent authors every Thursday night. Another interesting experiment, with the jury still out on this one, is taking place at Mind's Eye Fiction (http://tale.com/genres.htm), where you can read the first half of a story for free, but if you want to read the second half of the story, you have to pay for the privilege, which you can do by setting up an electronic account online and then clicking a few buttons; the fees are small, less than fifty cents per story in most cases. I think that this concept actually has a chance of working, although it would probably work better if they had some Bigger Name authors involved with the project, the kind of authors with lots of intensely loyal fans who might be willing and eager to pay a few cents to get an advance look at a story by their favorite author. This is another experiment that's worth keeping a close eye on, and one whose success or failure could have large implications for the future of SF-oriented e-zines on the Internet. A promising new SF-oriented e-zine is Dark Planet (http://www.sfsite.com/darkplanet/), which, in addition to reviews and other features, has published some professional-level work by Kelly Link, Gary A. Braunbeck, Ardath Mayhar, and others. Longer-established sites that are worth watching, although the quality of the fiction can be uneven and they are often not SF-oriented, include InterText (http://www.intertext.com/), and E-Scape (http://www.interink.com/escape.html). If none of these sites has satisfied your lust for e-zines, you can find lots of other genre "electronic magazines" by accessing http://dir.yahoo.com/Arts/Humanities/literature/genres/Science_Fiction_and_Fantasy/Magazines/, but be warned— much of the stuff you'll find on these sites is awful, no better than slush-pile quality (there's an unbelievable amount of it out there, too; you could wade through these sites for a solid year and still have oceans of it left to go by the time you gave up). Links to e-magazines and related sites of interest can also be found at sites such as Locus Online, SF Site, Science Fiction Weekly, and SFF.NET (see below). After this point, original science fiction stories of professional quality become harder to find, rather scarce on the ground, in fact. Many of the remaining SF-oriented sites are associated with existent print magazines— Eidolon: SF Online (http://www.eidolon.net/); Aurealis (http://www.aurealis.hl.net/) Asimov's Science Fiction (http://www.asimovs.com/); Analog Science Fiction and Fact (http://www.analogsf.com/); The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (http:www.sfsite.com/fsf/); Interzone (http://www.riviera.demon.co.uk/interzon.htm); Transversions (http://www.salmar.com/transversions/); Terra Incognita (http://www. voicenet.com/~incognit/); On Spec (http://www.icomm.ca/onspec/); Talebones (http://www.nventure.com/talebones/)— and although many of them have extensive archives of material, both fiction and nonfiction, previously published by the print versions of the magazines, few of them publish original online-only fiction with any regularity; most don't publish it at all, in fact. Magazines like Asimov's, Analog, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and others, regularly run teaser excerpts from stories coming up in forthcoming issues, and occasionally a chunk from an upcoming novel will appear somewhere, but complete original stories are rarer (I've run one online original, by Michael Swanwick and Sean Swanwick, on the Asimov's site, and would like to do more of this, but finding the money to finance it is not easy). Eidolon Online published a

good original story last year, which appeared in our Fifteenth Annual Collection, but don't seem to have done much along those lines since. Talebones seems to have published some original stories online (it's sometimes hard to tell, as attribution is often nonexistent) by Terry McGarry, Mary Soon Lee, Uncle River, Darell Schweitzer, and others. A good general site where you can be pretty sure of finding something of quality to read is the British Infinity Plus (http://www.users.zetnet.co.uk/iplus/), which features a very extensive selection of reprint stories, most by British authors, as well as extensive biographical and bibliographical information, book reviews, critical essays, and so forth— as far as I can tell, though, there are few if any original online-only stories published here, although they do publish novel extracts from upcoming novels. Fiction is not the only SF-oriented stuff of interest to check out on the Internet, however. Some of the most prominent SF-related sites on the Internet, and some of the sites that I visit the most frequently, are the general-interest sites that, while they don't publish fiction, do publish lots of reviews, critical articles, and genre-oriented news of various kinds. One of the most substantial of these sites is SF Site (www.sfsite.com/), which over the last year has turned itself into one of the most important genre-related sites on the whole Web. Their home page features an extensive selection of reviews of books, games, and magazines, interviews, critical retrospective articles, letters, and so forth, plus a huge archive of past reviews; in addition, starting with Asimov's and Analog early in 1998, they've become the host site for the Web pages of a significant percentage of all the SF/fantasy print magazines in existence, including The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and the recently assembled DNA Publishing group (see below) of Absolute Magnitude, Pirate Writings, Weird Tales, Aboriginal SF, and Dreams of Decadence (which can be accessed directly at http://www.sfsite.com/dnaweb/home.htm). In early 1999, they also instituted a section called Fictionhome (http://www.sfsite.com/fiction/fichome.htm), where reviews of and links to all of the above magazines can be found, and which also plays host to the electronic version of Tangent called Tangent Online, one of the few places online where you can read regularly scheduled reviews of short fiction, and to the online version of Science Fiction Chronicle. Another general-interest site that's one of my most frequent destinations while netsurfing is Locus Online (http://www.locusmag.com), the online version of the newsmagazine Locus; Locus Online is a great source for fast-breaking genre-related news, where it sometimes shows up weeks before it even makes it into the print Locus, but I must admit that to a large extent I read the site for the online version of Mark Kelly's short fiction-review column, the other place on the net where you can find regularly appearing reviews of SF and fantasy short fiction; there are also book reviews, critical lists, database archives, links to other sites of interest, and the like here. Another valuable general-interest site, one that's been around long enough to be almost venerable by the mayfly standards of the Internet, is Science Fiction Weekly (http://www.scifiweekly.com), which is somewhat more media-and-gaming oriented than SF Site or Locus Online, but which does feature book reviews every issue, of both new releases and classic reprints, and also features an erudite, opinionated, and occasionally fiercely controversial column by John Clute, perhaps SF's premiere critic. A new entry in this category is SFRevu (http: www.sfrevv.com//members.aol.com/sfrevu/), another site full of book and media reviews, and other genre-related information. SFF NET (http//www.sff.net) is a huge site that functions as a home away from home for many writers, featuring dozens of home pages for SF writers, genre-oriented "live chats," and, among other lists of data, the Locus Magazine Index 1984-1996, which is an extremely valuable research tool; you can also link to the Science Fiction Writers of America page from here, where valuable research data and reading lists are to be found as well, or you can link directly to the SFFWA Web Page at http://www.sfwa.org/. Live online interviews with prominent genre writers are now offered on a regular basis on many sites, including interviews sponsored by Asimov's and Analog and conducted by Gardner Dozois on the Sci-Fi Channel (http://www.scifi.com/chat/— there's also an enormous amount of SF-media-related stuff available here) every other Tuesday night at 9:00 P.M. EST, interviews conducted by Ellen Datlow every Thursday night at 9:00 P.M. EST on the Event Horizon site (http://www.eventhorizon.com/eventhorizon/), regular scheduled interviews on the Cybling site

(http://www.cybling.com/), and occasional interviews on the Talk City site (http://www.talkcity.com/). Many Bulletin Board Services, such as GEnie, Delphi (which also now has a Web site, http://www0.delphi.com/sflit/), Compuserve, and AOL, have large online communities of SF writers and fans (with GEnie having perhaps the largest and most active such community). Most of these services also feature regularly scheduled live interactive real-time "chats" or conferences, in which anyone interested in SF is welcome to participate, as does SFF NET— the SF-oriented chat on Delphi, the one with which I'm most familiar, and one which gives you the opportunity to schmooze with well-known professional SF writers in a relaxed and informal atmosphere, starts every Wednesday at about 10:00 P.M. EST. Many of the criticalzines also have Web sites, including The New York Review of Science Fiction (http://www.sfsite.com/isfdb/nyrsf.html), Nova Express (http://www.delphi.com/sflit/novaexpress/index.html), Speculations (http://www.speculations.com/), and SF Eye (http://www.empathy.com/eyeball/sfeye.html), although most of these sites are not particularly active ones. And for a funny and often iconoclastic slant on genre-oriented news, from multiple Hugo-winner David Langford, check out the online version of his fanzine Ansible (http://www. dcs.gla.ac.uk/Ansible/). There may not be a lot of original SF being published on the Net as yet, but the whole SF community on the Web is growing so fast, and is not only becoming larger but, perhaps more importantly, becoming more intensely interconnected, with links being forged from site to site, that it's an area well worth keeping an eye on. I suspect that it's an area that will become more and more important as we penetrate ever deeper into the new century ahead. *** It was a year of big changes in the semiprozine market, some of them potentially quite positive, others, alas, not so positive. The big story in the semiprozine market for 1998 was the consolidation of several struggling fiction semiprozines under the same roof. Warren Lapine's DNA Publications (previously the publisher of Absolute Magnitude) bought up several competing magazines this year, ending up with six of them: Absolute Magnitude, The Magazine of Science Fiction Adventures; Pirate Writings, Tales of Fantasy, Mystery & Science Fiction; Aboriginal Science Fiction; Weird Tales (back to its old title again after several issues in exile as Worlds of Fantasy and Horror); the all-vampire-fiction magazine Dreams of Decadence; and the new Australian magazine Altair (see below)— Warren became owner of all of these but Aboriginal Science Fiction, which he is managing; the current editors of all the magazines continue to provide the editorial content for a fee or a percentage, and DNA Publications handles the production, circulation, and the business end. The hope is that this move will enable DNA Publications to take advantage of the economies of scale and an increased "footprint" on the newsstand— the same strategy employed by Sovereign Media— as well as generating savings by streamlining the whole operation and making it more efficient. This could well work, as long as Warren hasn't bitten off more than he can chew and becomes overextended and swamped— if he can handle the workload, this could be a big boost to all of the above magazines, some of which have been struggling in the marketplace and could frankly use a boost. So this could turn out to be one of the most positive developments in the semiprozine market in some years. (Warren's other challenge will be to stabilize publication schedules, if he can— most of the above magazines only produced two issues apiece this year instead of following their announced publication schedules, a chronic problem throughout all of the

semiprozine market— and to try to produce a more reliable level of quality in the fiction published by those magazines; at the moment, quality is all over the place, from very good to at-best mediocre.) As mentioned above, the Web site for all of the DNA Publications magazines is http://www.sfsite.com/dnaweb/home.htm. Much of the rest of the news in this market is not so positive— some of it is downright bad, in fact. The eccentric and eclectic fiction semiprozine Crank! officially died this year, after publishing one last issue, as editor Bryan Cholfin announced that he was giving up the magazine so that he could concentrate on his publishing career; Cholfin is now working for Gordon Van Gelder at St. Martin's Press. With the death of Century— and, with no new issue in more than three years, I do consider it to be dead, in spite of occasional protests to the contrary, especially as editor Robert K. J. Killheffer has moved on to other projects— both of the most ambitious and literarily sophisticated American fiction semiprozines of the '90s are gone, a dispiriting track record for such magazines. With Crank! and Century dead, the most ambitious of the remaining American fiction semiprozines, and the one which is probably producing the highest percentage of high-end professional-level work, is newcomer Terra Incognita, which this year published an excellent story by Liz Williams, as well as good work by Kandis Elliot, John C. Waugh, Judy Klass, and others— the only problem is, they only managed to publish one out of their scheduled four issues this year, just like last year; they'll have to work hard on their reliability if they want to be the Contender that they potentially could be in this market; otherwise, they chance following Century into oblivion down the same old drain. The longer-established Tales of the Unanticipated, although not quite up to the same level of accomplishment, did publish some intriguing stuff this year by Eleanor Arnason, Lyda Morehouse, Sue Isle, Martha A. Hood, and others. Talebones, Fiction on the Dark Edge, although officially a horror semiprozine, seems to be adding a lot more science fiction and fantasy to its editorial mix these days (making it more attractive to me, anyway), and remains a lively and promising little magazine, definitely one to watch. Space & Time has been more uneven, but seems to be getting national distribution on some newsstands these days, and so may become more of a player in this market. If there were any issues of Non-Stop, Xizquil, Argonaut Science Fiction, Next Phase, Plot Magazine, or The Thirteenth Moon Magazine out this year, I didn't see them; I suspect at least some of these magazines are dead. A new SF fiction semiprozine called Age of Wonder published its first issue in early 1998 and died before the middle of the year, perhaps a new record even in the semiprozine market, where magazines often come and go with the speed of mayflies. The lead story from that first (and only) issue, by Gregory Benford, appeared later in the year under a different title in Science Fiction Age. Turning to our neighbor to the north, there are two Canadian fiction semiprozines, the long-established On Spec, one of the longest-running of all the fiction semiprozines, and a promising newcomer called TransVersions. On Spec has seemed a bit sunk in the doldrums for the last few years, with most of the fiction in it gray, oversolemn, and not particularly entertaining, publishing little good core science fiction, except for near-future dystopias (the magazine in general seems to take itself too seriously, as witness its annoying new slogan "more than just science fiction"— to which I must admit my immediate grumpy reaction was "some science fiction every once in a while would be nice, though"). Still, On Spec is one of the most reliably published of all the fiction semiprozines, and has published a lot of worthwhile stuff over the years, so we shouldn't give up on it; the magazine is set to go to a single editor instead of the "collective" that has been editing it (I don't believe that a committee is any better at selecting fiction than it is at any other task), which may perhaps perk up the fiction. TransVersions is also uneven, with some stuff at a decent professional level, and some not, but it seems to have more of a sense of fun about it than On Spec has had recently, and is livelier and less pretentious.

Turning our eyes overseas, two of the three longest-established fiction semiprozines (the other one is On Spec) are published in Australia: Aurealis and Eidolon. Although both magazines had their usual difficulty sticking to their quarterly publication schedule, they also published a fair amount of good professional-level fiction, by writers such as Terry Dowling, Simon Brown, Russell Blackford, and others in Aurealis (the Double Issue of Aurealis, Aurealis 20/21, also functions as an Alternate History anthology, about possible alternate futures of Australia), and writers such as William Dowding, Leanne Frahm, Sean Williams, and Simon Brown, and others in Eidolon; Eidolon is also home to perhaps the most technically difficult and formidable science column in the industry, likely over the head of even most Analog readers, by Greg Egan (the sort of column where the text says, "Therefore, we can see that" and then goes on to a solid page or two of equations) as well as a less-demanding new column by Howard Waldrop. Perhaps because of the "boom" that seems to be taking place in the Australian science fiction world, the Australian stuff seems to be more vigorous and substantial than a lot of the other material available elsewhere in the semiprozine market. Another new magazine joined the roster of Australian semiprozines this year, the promising newcomer Altair, which published two digest-size issues (the same format as Aurealis and Eidolon) this year out of a scheduled four, and which is soon going to be available in a full-size semiannual "American edition" from DNA Publications. The fiction in Altair is also uneven, as it is in most semiprozines, but they did feature some good professional-level work by Stephen Dedman, Ian Watson, Ben Jeapes, and others; they also publish a fair amount of nonfiction, but I think they could lose most of it without losing anything of real value (especially the beginner-level How to Write articles) and have more room for fiction. (Altair has a Web site at http://www.sfsite.com/altair/, and I suspect they'll soon be accessible at the DNA Publications site as well.) Another promising newcomer, a full-size, full-color British magazine called Odyssey, published five issues this year, and seemed to be struggling to establish an identity for itself; torn between being a science fiction magazine, a horror/fantasy magazine, and a media/gaming-oriented magazine, it managed to be sort of all and none of the above at the same time. The fiction was wildly uneven, ranging from ameuter-level stuff to good professional-level work by Ian Watson, Peter T. Garratt, Charles Stross, Ben Jeapes, Constance Ash, Mary Gentle, and others. My advice would be to concentrate more on the fiction, especially good solid core science fiction, and let some of the other stuff go. The covers here were often quite attractive, among the most striking in the industry, but the interior layout is often of the "hip" sort that makes it difficult to read the text, and something has to be done about that— this problem actually seemed to be getting worse rather than better in later issues, culminating in issue 6, where printing stories like Charles Stross's "Extracts from the Club Diary" in light type over gray pages already printed with an illustration made large parts of the story almost impossible to read. A little less coolness and a little more legibility, please! Despite such problems, this is a promising magazine, and could be very good indeed if it manages to shape itself up. Most of the other British fiction semiprozines lean heavily toward "slipstream" and literary surrealism of various sorts; the most prominent of these at the moment seem to be The Third Alternative and the long-established Back Brain Recluse. I think there might have been an issue of Irish semiprozine Albedo 1 this year, but, if so, I missed it. I don't follow the horror semiprozine market much any more, but there the most prominent magazines seem to be the highly respected Cemetery Dance, and perhaps Talebones. Turning to the critical magazines, as always, Charles N. Brown's Locus and Andy Porter's SF Chronicle , remain your best bets among that subclass of semiprozines known as "newszines," and are your best resources if you're looking for publishing news or an overview of what's happening in the genre. The New York Review of Science Fiction, edited by David G. Hartwell, completed its tenth full year of publication, once again not only publishing its scheduled twelve issues but publishing them all on time— in the entire semiprozine market, fiction and non-fiction, this is a trick that only Locus and The New York Review of Science Fiction seem to know how to do; most other magazines count themselves lucky if

they can manage to bring out half their scheduled issues. As always, the magazine was full of tasty and informative stuff, articles and reviews that ran the gamut from fascinating to infuriating (sometimes both at once), and eclectic little gems such as "Read This" lists by various well-known authors. Other intriguing critical stuff can be found in Steve Brown's Science Fiction Eye and in Lawrence Person's Nova Express— when you can find them; actually, this was a red-letter year for Nova Express, which managed two issues in the same year, something of a record. There were big changes in the offing this year for David A. Truesdale's Tangent, which for several years now has performed an invaluable service by providing a place where interested readers can find reviews of most of the year's short fiction, something that can be found almost nowhere else in the field, except for Mark Kelly's short fiction review column in Locus. In late 1997 and early 1998, however, there were signs that Tangent was becoming bogged down, and they began delaying and missing issues (my own feeling was that Truesdale was making the magazine too complicated, taking on too many new columns and features, more every issue, it seemed; the basic task they had to do— covering the year's short fiction— was huge and complex enough by itself without having to deal with all of that other stuff as well). Only one issue of Tangent came out in 1998, a "Special Double Collector's Issue" released in time for the Baltimore Worldcon, and it was immediately evident that most of the reviews in the issue were of stuff from the previous year; clearly, Tangent was falling behind, and rumors began to circulate that the magazine would soon disappear and be heard from no more. Instead, I'm very pleased to say, it metamorphosed rather than died, and can now be found in a new form as Tangent Online (http://www.sfsite.com/tangent/index.htm), part of SF Site's short-fiction-oriented new site, Fictionhome , and where, liberated from the constraints of printing, production, and distribution, it has already "published" four issues in electronic online format, with a return to something like its old vigor (although there are still too many columns and features, in my opinion, even in the online version; the other stuff we can get elsewhere— Tangent should stick to reviewing stories). Since the loss of Tangent would be a major blow to the field, we should all breathe a sigh of relief. An as-yet unanswered question is, What will be the fate of the print version of Tangent? Supposedly it will continue, as a semiannual supplement to the online version— but it wouldn't entirely surprise me to see the print version fade and Tangent Online become the "real" version instead. Speculations, which features writing-advice articles as well as extensive sections of market reports and market news, remains a useful resource for young or would-be authors. (Locus, The Newspaper of the Science Fiction Field, Locus Publications, Inc., P.O. Box 13305, Oakland, California 94661, $53.00 for a one-year first-class subscription, 12 issues; Science Fiction Chronicle, P.O. Box 022730, Brooklyn, N.Y. 11202-0056, $25.00 for one-year first-class subscription, 12 issues; The New York Review of Science Fiction, Dragon Press, P.O. Box 78, Pleasantville, NY, 10570, $32.00 per year, 12 issues; Science Fiction Eye, P.O. Box 18539, Asheville, NC 28814, $12.50 for one year; Nova Express, P.O. Box 27231, Austin, Texas 78755-2231, $12 for a one-year (four-issue) subscription; Tangent, 5779 Norfleet, Raytown, MO 64133, $20 for one year, four issues; Speculations, 111 West El Camino Real, Suite #109-400, Sunnyvale, CA 94087-1057, a first-class subscription, six issues, $25; Aboriginal Science Fiction, P.O. Box 2449, Woburn, MA 01888-0849, $19.00 for four issues; Marion Zimmer Bradley's Fantasy Magazine, P.O. Box 249, Berkeley, CA 94701, $16 for four issues in U.S.; Odyssey, Partizan Press 816-818 London Road, Leigh-on-Sea, Essex SS9 3NH, United Kingdom, $35 for a five-issue subscription, $75 for a twelve-issue subscription; On Spec, More Than Just Science Fiction, P.O. Box 4727, Edmonton, AB, Canada T6E 5G6, $18 for a one-year subscription; Aurealis, the Australian Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Chimaera Publications, P.O. Box 2164, Mt. Waverley, Victoria 3149, Australia, $43 for a four-issue overseas airmail subscription, "all cheques and money orders must be made out to Chimarea Publications in Australian dollars"; Eidolon, the Journal of Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy, Eidolon Publications, P.O. Box 225, North Perth, Western Australia 6906, $45 (Australian) for a four-issue overseas airmail subscription, payable to Eidolon Publications; Altair, Alternate Airings

of Speculative Fiction, PO Box 475, Blackwood, South Australia, 5051, Australia, $36 for a four-issue subscription; Back Brain Recluse, P.O. Box 625, Sheffield S1 3GY, United Kingdom, $18 for four issues; REM, REM Publications, 19 Sandringham Road, Willesden, London NW2 5EP, United Kingdom, £7.50 for four issues; Pirate Writings, Tales of Fantasy, Mystery & Science Fiction, DNA Publications, PW Subscriptions, P.O. Box 2988, Radford, VA 24142, $15 for one year (four issues) Absolute Magnitude, The Magazine of Science Fiction Adventures, P.O Box 13, Greenfield, MA 01302, four issues for $14, all checks payable to "D.N.A. Publications"; TransVersions, Paper Orchid Press, 216 Woodfield Road, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4L 2W7, four-issue subscription, $20 Can. or U.S.; Terra Incognita, Terra Incognita, 52 Windermere Avenue #3, Lansdowne, PA 19050-1812, $15 for four issues; Talebones, Fiction on the Dark Edge, Fairwood Press, 10531 SE 250th Pl. #104, Kent, WA 98031, $16 for four issues; Cemetery Dance, CD Publications, Box 18433, Baltimore, MD 21237.) *** It was a fairly weak year for original anthologies, with a few moderately bright spots. Starlight 2 (Tor), edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden, was probably the best original science fiction anthology published this year in the United States, but the competition it had to overcome to claim the title this year was even weaker than the competition the original Starlight 1 had to overcome back in 1996. Starlight 2 is still a superior anthology, containing two of the year's best stories, by Robert Charles Wilson and Ted Chiang, and good, quirky, ambitious work by several other authors, but it is by no means as strong overall as Starlight 1 was, and doesn't seem to be generating the same kind of critical buzz, either. As mentioned, my favorites in Starlight 2 were Ted Chiang's complex and subtle novella "Story of Your Life" and Robert Charles Wilson's clever metaphysical reductio ad absurdum "Divided by Infinity." A step below those was Ellen Kushner's "The Death of the Duke," an elegant fantasy story strongly reminiscent in mood of later-period Le Guin (a high compliment as far as I'm concerned), Geoffrey A. Landis's bitter "Snow," David Langford's somewhat less bitter but more complicated take on similar territory, "A Game of Consequences," and Esther M. Friesner's unflinchingly brutal "Brown Dust," definitely not an example of Friesner in her more characteristic Funny Stuff or Sentimental modes (considered in light of Roger Zelazny's well-known dictum that a short story should be the last chapter of a novel you don't actually write, it struck me as interesting that Friesner's "Brown Dust" reads more like the first chapter of a novel she didn't actually write; it wouldn't be hard for her to go on from here and actually write such a novel either, in spite of what happens to her protagonist in the course of the story). A step below these were several stories I didn't have a strong reaction to one way or the other, competent but not (to me, anyway) exciting, including Susanna Clarke's kidnapped-by-faeries fantasy, "Mrs Mabb," Martha Soukup's better-watch-out-what-you-wish-for story on the borderline of science fiction, "The House of Expectations," and M. Shayne Bell's entertaining but somewhat unlikely time-travel story (I can't really believe that the minor change he posits would have the wide-sweeping effect he claims it would have), "Lock Down." Everything else in the book struck me as flawed to one degree or another. Raphael Carter's "Congenital Agenesis of Gender Ideation" has some very intriguing ideas, but, as fiction presented in the form of an academic paper, it is also as dry as the form it is mimicking. Carter Scholz's surrealistic "The Amount to Carry" is vividly and lyrically written, but probably a good deal too long; toward the end, it began to seem dull rather than nightmarish, and I doubt I would have finished it if I hadn't been paid to do so; it also breaks no new ground for Scholz, being the sort of territory he's

covered several times in the past. Angélica Gorodischer's "The End of a Dynasty," elegantly translated by Ursula K. Le Guin, has some amusing touches, but again seems ultimately uninvolving and overly stylized to me. I responded least well to Jonathan Lethem's "Access Fantasy," which in spite of its pose of hip modernism comes across (to me, anyway) as recycled Galaxy-era satire, starting out in a traffic jam on the highway that's been locked in place so long that whole families have been living in their cars for decades, raising their children there, and going on to become a killer satire of the advertising industry. Overall, a fair number of the stories here seem dry and abstract to me; not only is there not much color, action, or (with a few significant exceptions) sense-of-wonder stuff here, but there's really not a lot of genuine emotion of any sort generated by most of the stories. Highly intelligent, but cool and somewhat remote. I suppose that "dry" is as good an overall characterizing adjective as any for this volume. The Chiang novella and the Robert Charles Wilson story, though, are among the best stories of the year, and, along with the Friesner, the Landis, the Kushner, and a few others, definitely make this anthology worth the price of admission, even as an expensive hardcover, even if it's not as memorable overall as the original Starlight 1 had been. With these two volumes, Starlight has firmly established itself as one of the most important anthology series of recent years, and it is to be hoped that it will continue for many years to come. A worthwhile follow-up candidate for the title of best original SF anthology of the year, behind Starlight 2, is harder to find, although I guess I would have to vote for Lord of the Fantastic (Avon Eos), edited by Martin H. Greenberg, the Roger Zelazny tribute anthology, even though it contains almost as much fantasy as it does science fiction, and some of the best stories in it are reprints, having appeared previously in Science Fiction Age and Asimov's Science Fiction. The contents of the anthology break down roughly into two parts: those stories that really have nothing in particular to do with Roger Zelazny or his work, and that could have appeared with equal justification in any other market (several of these authors claim "inspiration" by Zelazny as a rationale for their inclusion here, but that inspiration often doesn't show up on the page to any noticeable degree), and those that either use Zelazny characters and settings or attempt to do a pastiche or homage to his characteristic and highly individual writing style, even when, as in Walter Jon Williams's "Lethe," they don't use any actual thematic material from Zelazny's published work (as a subset of this category, there are also several stories that use the author himself as a character, embroiling him with time-travelers or aliens, a type of story familiar from the earlier Jack Williamson and Ray Bradbury tribute anthologies, and from the Isaac Asimov memorial anthology; the most ingenious story of this type is Robert Silverberg's "Call Me Titan," which also does a moderately good job of pastiching Zelazny's exuberant style); both categories can then be broken down further into successful and less successful stories, with good and bad stuff in both. It's an uneven anthology, with a lot of weak material in it— although only one story, Jennifer Roberson's "Mad Jack," was bad enough to make me throw the book across the room in disgust— but also with good to excellent work by William Browning Spencer, William Sanders, John Varley, and Neil Gaiman, solid entertaining work by Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Jack Williamson, Pati Nagle, Steven Brust, John J. Miller, Jane Lindskold, Jack C. Haldeman II, and others, plus the above-mentioned reprints by Robert Silverberg, Walter Jon Williams, and Gregory Benford, all of high quality, and all of which will still count toward the strength of the volume as far as the average reader is concerned. It was interesting to me that so many of the authors who did use characters or settings from Zelazny's work chose fantasy rather than science fiction, and that much of their inspiration was drawn from Zelazny's later work rather than from his earlier, more famous stuff— there is nothing here that draws on Lord of Light or the Amber novels, for instance, but there are several stories that seem to have been

inspired by Zelazny's late fantasy A Night in the Lonesome October, and at least one that draws its inspiration from Zelazny's Flying Dutchman fantasy, And Only I Am Escaped to Tell Thee, although that produces one of the book's strongest stories, the Varley (which is, however, a story that doesn't really seem to owe that much stylistically or conceptually to Zelazny, once given the basic theme, and could have appeared anywhere without the Zelazny connection being particularly noticeable). Steven Brust does draw on the background of an alien-dominated Earth from This Immortal, a background rich enough to support a dozen more stories, and I can see that this one might even have been a story Zelazny himself might have chosen to tell (although if he did, certainly he would have found a way to tell it that didn't bog the story down in technical poker terms to such a degree that the narrator has to call a halt to the narration to explain them every couple of paragraphs!), and Nina Kiriki Hoffman draws on Isle of the Dead, but I would like to have seen more such use made of Zelazny's colorful worlds and characters, especially the science fictional ones; with such material to draw on, it seems a shame to settle for standard bland contemporary-fantasy backgrounds, as several authors do. Some authors reflect Zelazny's fondness for playing mix-and-match with elements from different mythological systems, although only Silverberg and William Sanders really do this well, and only Sanders succeeds at catching a bit of the flavor of caustic humor and deliberate playful anachronism that usually characterized Zelazny's own ventures into this area. Of all the book's authors, only William Browning Spencer and Neil Gaiman come close to catching the flavor of high-spirited, rapid-fire, pyrotechnic outrageousness that characterized early Zelazny at his best, and only Neil Gaiman really plays with the language in anything like the exuberant, freewheeling, risk-taking way that Zelazny played with it in his prime. At a rather modest (by today's standards) cover price of $14.00, Lord of the Fantastic is a fairly good reading bargain, and will certainly be worth the money to most readers. Another of 1998's few worthwhile anthologies was Bending the Landscape: Science Fiction, Original Gay and Lesbian Writing (Overlook), edited by Nicola Griffith and Stephen Pagel, although this was not as strong an anthology overall as 1997's Bending the Landscape: Fantasy. The anthology contains a lot of minor material, and even most of the good stories here provide either a strong SF element or a strong gay element, but rarely integrate both elements in a balanced way in a single story. In some of the stories, such as Keith Hartman's "Sex, Guns, and Baptists," both elements are superficial and arbitrary, since there's no intrinsic reason why the story (a familiar one about a private investigator spying on an illicit couple in a hotel-room tryst, and the consequences that arise when his emotionally unstable client finds out what's going on inside) needed to be told about a gay couple in the first place, and the very minimal SF elements present, like the PI's "fiber-optic snake," are window-dressing, so that there was no compelling reason for this story to be either about gay people or a science fiction story. To show that SF and gay themes can be combined in such a way that each is dependent on the other, and the synthesis gives the author a way to say something about society that otherwise could not easily be said, one only needs to point to Greg Egan's "Cocoon" (only the first such example to come to mind), but there is little here that successfully integrates the anthology's two elements in an organic way. There are excellent stories here by Ellen Klages (the most successful of the book's authors in providing a story where both the SF element and the gay element are integral to the plot) and Jim Grimsley (whose story is the most emotionally powerful in the book— but also has so little to do with homosexuality that the gay element is almost subliminal), as well as good work by Rebecca Ore, Nancy Kress, Mark W. Tiedemann, L. Timmel Duchamp, Charles Sheffield, and others— but at $26.95, it's rather steeply priced for what you get, and some readers may be disappointed. (The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc., Lewis Hollow Road, Woodstock, New York 12498— $26.95 for Bending the Landscape: Science Fiction .) Also interesting, if not quite in the same weight class as the anthologies above, is the mixed original-and-reprint anthology More Amazing Stories (Tor), edited by Kim Mohan. As I read this book,

I found myself wondering how best to describe the flavor of the "typical Amazing story"; there is such a flavor, I think, but articulating it precisely is difficult. The typical Amazing story is less rigorous than an Analog story, less literarily intense than an Asimov's story ... which ought to make it roughly the same as an F&SF story, but that's not quite it either; there are noticeable differences in flavor between the usual Amazing story and the usual F&SF story as well, although the stuff in Amazing is perhaps somewhat closer to F&SF material in feel than it is to either Analog or Asimov's. About the closest I can come to it is that many of the stories in Amazing mix science fiction and fantasy in the same story, producing stories that can either be looked at as hybrids of SF and fantasy (if you're feeling charitable) or nonrigorous SF that doesn't concern itself much with scientific plausibility or social consistency (if you're not). The best story by a good margin in the anthology, for instance, Ursula K. Le Guin's reprint story "Unchosen Love," is a ghost story that takes place in a science fiction milieu. The best of the original stories here, Eleanor Arnason's "The Gauze Banner," is a "translation" into English of a consciously crafted bit of mythology, featuring gods with vast supernatural powers, created by an alien living in another science fiction milieu (and who probably doesn't believe in the actual existence of the gods he's describing either). SF, or fantasy? Or a bit of both? The life-transforming "miracles" for sale in Nancy Springer's "The Time of Her Life" are couched superficially in terms of technology, and yet that technology is never really explained or rationalized and makes little real sense either in itself or as part of a society, and the shopkeepers who proffer it are called "angels." Along the same lines, not even a token scientific double-talk explanation of the machine that keeps a mother's baby in some sort of suspension, waking it for an hour every few years, is ever offered in Marti McKenna's "Perchance to Dream," and little time is wasted wondering about what the overall effect on society such technology would be; it's merely an enabling device to allow the mother to grow old while her baby stays forever young, and a magic spell would have done the job just as effectively, if not more so. And so it goes with story after story here, many of which are presented as science fiction, and couched in SF's terminology, but where the fantastic element is so unexamined and unexplained, and exists in such isolation from the rest of the society, that the story might just as well be fantasy. It strikes me that the closest relative to "the typical Amazing story," with its SF furniture and fantasy aesthetic, is probably not to be found in print literature at all, but rather in television— it's very close to the mix used in television's The Twilight Zone, where the premises could shock or amuse, but very rarely stood up under any sort of closer examination. Like The Twilight Zone, sometimes the results are very entertaining; sometimes they're just annoying. The original stories here are, for the most part, solid and entertaining but not particularly memorable or first-rate; the best of the lot is the Arnason, with good work also being done by S. N. Dyer, L. A. Taylor, Don Webb, and others, but the anthology as a whole is strengthened by the presence of some good reprint work, including the above-mentioned Le Guin story and reprint stories by Howard Waldrop, Gregory Benford, James Alan Gardner, and Philip K. Dick, and is further bolstered by an interesting article about the work of Philip K. Dick by Robert Silverberg, so the package as a whole does deliver value for your money, although at a somewhat steep cover price of $24.95, it's probably a marginal buy; it would be a better deal if it was being offered as a cheaper trade paperback or mass-market. An unusual item is Dreaming Down-Under, edited by Jack Dann and Janeen Webb, a huge mixed anthology of Australian science fiction, fantasy, horror, and "magic realism" (by which the editors seem to mean literary surrealism of various sorts), which may well be the best overall anthology of the year, pound for pound, although few American readers will have seen it, and it's so inclusive across so many genre lines that it's hard to know where to categorize it. In the United States, the different genres represented in Dreaming Down-Under are to a large extent kept discrete; you may see a couple of

them represented in the same magazine or anthology, but rarely all of them. This mixing of different genres in one literary package seems to be characteristic of Australia, though— the new Australian Best of the Year anthology series edited by Jonathan Strahan and Jeremy G. Byrne is set up that way, and you'll find a similar mix of genres in most issues of Australian semiprozines such as Eidelon and Aurealis. (For what it's worth, the cover copy here refers to this mix as "wild-side fiction," listing its elements as "fantasy, horror, magic realism, cyberpunk and science fiction"; interesting that those last two seem to be considered to be separate subgenres!) For someone accustomed to American practice, it may seem as though there are really several different books here in one package, and, in fact, it would be easy enough to carve Dreaming Down-Under up into separate volumes of science fiction, fantasy, and horror (which would still leave a few literary "unclassifiables" left over!) ... and I wonder if indeed this won't be its fate when the American publishing industry finally comes to grips with the problem of an American edition (or editions). Still, having so many different genres represented in one volume does give you a one-stop overview across the entire spectrum of the booming Australian publishing scene, and the anthology is worthwhile for that alone, as well as serving as an introduction to a great many writers of whom most of the American audience will not have heard before. For me, the most effective stories here were usually the ones that had the most local color, the ones that, if science fiction, dealt the most centrally with the special problems and characteristics of Australian society and culture, or, if fantasy, the ones that centered around aboriginal mythology or the (sometimes hybrid) folkways developed by the Europeans after settlement; the further away from Australian settings, themes, and concerns the stories got, the weaker they became generally. There is a fair amount of weak material here: there's too much second-generation cyberpunk, which is beginning to feel a bit tired fifteen years after Neuromancer, the horror is mild by contemporary American standards, and some of the stories are minor enough that it seems likely that they were used only because of a (perhaps misplaced) desire to be as inclusive as possible across the wide spectrum of currently active Australian writers (although, in this context, the absence of Greg Egan, probably Australia's hottest genre writer of the '90s, may be remarked upon by some)— but the book is so huge that a strong still-larger-than-normal-size anthology could still be put together out of what's left. Dreaming Down-Under contains excellent science fiction by Chris Lawson, Cherry Wilder, Damien Broderick, Terry Dowling, David J. Lake, Sean Williams, Dirk Strasser, and others, good fantasy by Stephen Dedman, Lucy Sussex, Simon Brown, Jane Routley, Rosaleen Love, Sean McMullen, Kelly Greenwood, and others, and good horror by Wynne Whiteford, Sara Douglas, Ian Nichols, Paul Brandon, and others. The most frustrating item here is part of a science fiction novella by the late George Turner, left unfinished when he died; what there is of it here is first-rate work (if the rest of the story lived up to the promise of what's on the page here, it probably would have been the best story in the book, and one of the best of the year). It's a tragedy that Turner was unable to complete it, but I wonder if it was really a good idea to include an unfinished novella in the anthology, although no doubt Turner completists will be glad to have it; the casual reader, though, is likely to find it just frustrating. On the whole, then, this is an anthology that's well worth the money, both in itself and as a window on a whole fascinating world of science fiction and fantasy that's developed in parallel to but distinct from American genre work and even British genre work, a world produced by convergent evolution, in some ways familiar, and yet also various and strange. Alternate Generals (Baen), edited by Harry Turtledove, is both more substantial and less flamboyant than most of the long string of Alternate History anthologies edited in recent years by Mike Resnick, for both better and worse; there are no really first-rate stories here, as occasionally did crop up as the high points of the Resnick Alternate anthologies (Maureen McHugh's "The Lincoln Train," for instance, or Pat Cadigan's "Dispatches from the Revolution"), but if the highs are not as high, the lows are not as low, either. You get far fewer of the kind of stories that postulate the wildly improbable if not impossible (and

often downright silly) scenarios ("Suppose Mother Teresa formed an outlaw gang during the Depression with Einstein and Albert Schweitzer!", "Suppose Buddy Holly became president of the United States!") that often filled the Resnick anthologies, stories that, in the more extreme cases, strike me as being just fantasy stories with all-star celebrity casts rather than valid science fiction at all (the same way I feel about Kim Newman and Eugene Byrne's "Alternate History" stories that have been running for years in Interzone). Not surprisingly, considering that Harry Turtledove is the editor, the stories here are less frothy and "playful" and more stick-to-your-ribs substantial, with less emphasis on the self-consciously "outrageous" juxtaposition of wild and crazy images and much more emphasis on historical scenarios that, although often unlikely, actually could happen— which, in my opinion, is where the interest of most good Alternate History stories lies: seeing how radical a change in subsequent history you can produce by altering only one or two historical parameters, things that might actually have happened but which (in this universe) did not. The trick is to do that without spinning away into anything-can-happen-What-if-Napoleon-had-a-B-52-at-Waterloo? fantasies, which for serious Alternate History writers is the equivalent of the hard science writers's famous complaint about "playing with the net down." The authors here do a pretty good job of pulling off that trick, on the whole, walking the line between "imaginative" and "impossible." The overall mood of the anthology is serious, if not somber (in a few cases, almost a bit stodgy), and many of the alternate history scenarios are ingenious, and elegantly minimalist, producing substantial ultimate changes from small changes in initial conditions. "Substantial," in fact, is a good overall word to describe this particular book. It helps to be a history buff if you're really going to appreciate Alternate Generals— and, in fact, it helps to be a military history buff; if you're not, you may have difficulty here and there figuring out how and why things have changed from the actual history of our world; you may not even know what the actual events were in the first place, which diminishes the impact of seeing them cleverly changed, always a fundamental problem for Alternate History; without hitting the reference books, for instance, I find that I have no idea what the "real history" events are that are being altered in a story such as Elizabeth Moon's otherwise-rousing chase-and-battle-at-sea story "Tradition," and I doubt that many other readers will, either. There are a few other stories that suffer from this syndrome as well. The best stories here are William Sanders's vivid "Billy Mitchell's Overt Act" and Lois Tilton's ingenious "The Craft of War," but the book also features, yes, substantial work by Esther M. Friesner, David Weber, R. M. Meluch, Lillian Stewart Carl, S. M. Stirling, Turtledove himself, and others. At a cover price of $5.99, it's a solid reading value. Interestingly, perhaps out of a fear that there aren't that many military history buffs out there after all, the publisher has done its best with its packaging and its cover copy to make this look like one of the Resnick-style wild-and-crazy juxta-positions kind of anthologies, instead of what it actually is. The cover painting, for instance, features a Roman soldier riding in a World War II-style tank, and the back-cover copy burbles "At Gaugemela the Macedonians had Alexander and the Persians had— Darius.... But what if the Persians had— Erwin Rommel. Or what if George S. Patton had commanded Southern forces at Bull Run, and Lincoln had become a Confederate prisoner?"— all scenarios which, as far as I can tell, do not occur in any of the stories in the book. I'm not sure of the wisdom of trying to fool the reading public into thinking they're buying one kind of thing when actually they're getting quite a different kind of thing altogether (if Baen wanted a Resnick-style alternate history anthology, why didn't they hire Resnick to do one for them in the first place?), as though consumers who thought they were buying chocolate ice cream won't notice they're been given strawberry instead, but that's pretty much what the packaging here attempts to do. Strange. There was also an Alternate-History-of-Canada anthology this year, Arrow-Dreams: An Anthology of Alternate Canadas (Nuage Editions), edited by Mark Shainblum and John Dupuis, most of the contents of which were earnest but rather dull, although there is interesting work here by Eric Choi, Derryl

Murphy, Glenn Grant, and others. (Nuage Editions, P.O. Box 206, RPO Corydon, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada R3M 3S7— CDN $19.95 for ArrowDreams: An Anthology of Alternate Canadas.) (We somehow missed another original anthology of Canadian fiction, Tesseracts6 [Tesseract], edited by Robert J. Sawyer and Carolyn Clink, which we'll have to save for next year.) The double issue of the Australian semiprozine Aurealis, Aurealis 20/21, also functions as an Alternate History anthology about the possible futures ahead for Australia, and is somewhat livelier and more entertaining than its Canadian counterpart, with good work by Simon Brown, Terry Dowling, Sue Isle, Russell Blackford, and others, although most of the scenarios here are not terribly likely either. An even more specialized Alternate History item is Alternate Skiffy (Wildside Press), edited by Mike Resnick and Patrick Nielsen Hayden, which I missed when it appeared late last year. As the title indicates, this anthology makes no bones about being frivolous, even unabashedly silly; in effect, it's a sequence of in-jokes about science fiction fandom and prodom, with almost no chance of being appreciated by anyone who isn't seriously involved in those worlds: fan fiction, in other words, although sometimes superior examples of same. The best stories here are David Langford's droll and satirical "The Spear of the Sun" (which originally appeared in Interzone, and was reprinted in Asimov's a few years back, while this anthology presumably languished on the shelf) and Frederik Pohl's sly and ingenious "The Golden Years of Astounding," which makes a surprisingly plausible case for what science fiction would have been like if John W. Campbell had been fired early on and Donald Wollheim put in charge of Astounding instead (although I doubt if even the formidable Wollheim would really have been capable of talking J. R. R. Tolkien into writing his magnum opus as a space opera, The Lord of Saturn's Rings, rather than as a fantasy— it's a good joke, though, the best in the book). There's other good work here from Barry N. Malzberg, Gregory Feeley, Anthony R. Lewis, Greg Cox, and others. If you're a science fiction fan (particularly a convention-attending fan) or professional, or at least are moderately familiar with the history of the genre, you may well get a few chuckles, and even a belly laugh or two, out of this material. If you're not, I suspect that most of the stories might as well be written in Sanskrit, for all you're going to be able to get out of them. (The Wildside Press, 522 Park Avenue, Berkeley Heights, NJ 07922— $9 for Alternate Skiffy.) There was also a reprint anthology of Alternate History stories, Roads Not Taken (Del Rey), edited by Gardner Dozois and Stanley Schmidt. Although it has the odd distinction of having the second silliest idea for a theme anthology of the year ( Dangerous Vegetables edges it out by a hair), Alien Pets (DAW), edited by Denise Little, turns out to be a decent although unexciting and unexceptional anthology, perhaps even worth the money at a cover price of $5.99, one made up for the most part of pleasant but minor stories. After "pleasant but minor," there really isn't a whole lot left to say about the book, except to observe that the template of the Alien Pet story seems to have been set by Robert Heinlein all the way back in The Star Beast, where the protagonist's alien pet actually turns out to be a sentient being of one degree or another of importance in the galactic scheme of things; several stories here ring minor changes on this basic idea. There's nothing even close to exceptional here, but the best work in the anthology is by Jack Williamson, Michelle West, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Jane M. Lindskold, and Bruce Holland Rogers. Oddball items included Clones and Clones (Norton), edited by Martha C. Nussbaum and Cass R. Sunstein, a mixed fiction and (mostly) nonfiction anthology about, what else, clones (the nonfiction stuff is rather elementary for a genre audience, with the exception of one nice piece by Stephen Jay Gould, and the fiction is largely uninspired, with the exception of one decent story by Lisa Tuttle), and, even odder, an anthology called Lamps on the Brow (James Cahill Publishing), edited by James Cahill, which was published in a print run of only 200 copies by a small press; even after reading the introduction and such front matter as there is, I have no idea what the ostensible theme of this anthology is, what the criterion

for inclusion was, or why it's called Lamps on the Brow. The book contains an interesting "Introduction" about immortality by Ben Bova (various sorts of "immortality"— or at least of persistence after death— would be my guess as to a unifying theme here, if there is one, although it's a stretch), reprint stories by A. E. van Vogt and Gregory Benford, and mostly minor original stories by Bruce Bethke, David Brin, Andre Norton, Mike Resnick and Josepha Sherman, Harry C. Stubbs (not, note, "Hal Clement"), Gene Wolfe, and Laura Resnick, the most substantial of which is probably the Stubbs, a standard Analog-type struggle-to-survive-on-a-hostile-world planet with some good detail, interesting because the protagonist does not survive. Another offbeat, hard-to-classify item is Leviathan 2, The Legacy of Boccaccio (Ministry of Whimsy Press), edited by Jeff VanderMeer and Rose Secrest, an anthology of "slipstream" stories that may be too far out on the edge for most genre readers, although it does contain interesting work by L. Timmel Duchamp, Stepan Chapman, and others. (Ministry of Whimsy Press, Post Office Box 4248, Tallahassee, Florida 32315— $10.99 for Leviathan 2, The Legacy of Boccacio.) Also unusual is Frontiers: On the Edge of the Empire, 3rd Encounters of Science Fiction & Fantasy (Simetria), edited by Maria Augusta and Antonio de Macedo, a book from the Portuguese Science Fiction Association, with stories by a mixed group of Portuguese and English authors, the stories presented in Portuguese on one side of the book, the same stories presented in English on the flip side. L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Volume XIV (Bridge), edited by Dave Wolverton, presents, as usual, novice work by beginning writers, some of whom may later turn out to be important talents. Much the same sort of thing could be said about Spec-Lit, Speculative Fiction No 2, edited by Phyllis Eisenstein, the second in a series of anthologies that collects student work from Eisenstein's writing class at Columbia College in Chicago— most of the work here is at a competent professional level, and this time there is work by more experienced hands such as Valerie J. Freireich and Phyllis Eisenstein herself, as well as good reprints by George R. R. Martin and Alfred Bester. (For Spec-Lit, No 2, send $11.95 to Phyllis Eisenstein, Editor-in-Chief, Spec-Lit, Fiction Writing Department, Columbia College Chicago, 600 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL 60605-1996; make checks payable to Columbia College Chicago.) Other original SF anthologies this year included the above-mentioned Dangerous Vegetables (Baen), "created by Keith Laumer," edited by Martin H. Greenberg; Armageddon (Baen), edited by David Drake and Billie Sue Mosiman; The UFO Files (DAW), edited by Ed Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg; and The Conspiracy Files (DAW), edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Scott H. Urban. Shared-world anthologies this year included: More Than Honor (Baen), by David Weber, David Drake, and S. M. Stirling; Worlds of Honor (Baen), edited by David Weber; The Man-Kzin Wars VIII: Choosing Names (Baen), edited by Larry Niven; and Dragonlance: The Dragons of Chaos (TSR), edited by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. One of the big stories for next year will probably be the appearance of the science fiction version of Legends, new stories in a popular and long-running series by major authors called Far Horizons, edited by Robert Silverberg. There's also an as-yet untitled major new original anthology series that will be "like Full Spectrum," edited by many of the same people who worked on Full Spectrum, in the works from Avon Eos; the first volume of that may appear next year, and is keenly anticipated. Another volume of Starlight is also in the works. There was still no sign of an edition of George Zebrowski's long-delayed anthology series Synergy this year, or of a new edition of New Worlds, and, considering all the downsizing that has been going on at White Wolf, I think it's fair to wonder if either of those anthology series is still viable; we'll just have to wait and see. In fantasy, the best original anthology of the year by far was Legends (Tor), edited by Robert Silverberg, an anthology of new stories set in various famous fantasy worlds. I was inclined to dislike Legends,

turned off by the hype and hoopla about the record size of its advance (by far the largest ever paid for an anthology) and by the cynical "market savvy" of assembling a book composed only of best-selling authors— but I must admit that the finished book turns out to be a very substantial anthology, standing head and shoulders above the minor fantasy theme anthologies that make up the rest of this category, undoubtedly the best fantasy anthology of the year. The best story here is Ursula K. Le Guin's exquisitely crafted novella "Dragonfly," but the book also contains strong work by George R. R. Martin, Stephen King, Terry Prachett, Orson Scott Card, Robert Silverberg, Robert Jordan, Terry Goodkind, Anne McCaffrey, and others, all of which— since we're talking about novellas here and this is a huge anthology— makes Legends one of the best reading bargains, value received for money paid, of the year. (I'm bemused, though, by the fact that Anne McCaffery's "Dragonrider" series and Robert Silverberg's "Majipoor" series, both of which started out as science fiction series, have seemingly now become fantasy series instead by some discretely unspoken understanding. Some of the series represented here, such as Stephen King's "Gunslinger" series— and, to a lesser extent, Orson Scott Card's "Alvin Maker" series— had strong cross-genre elements in them from the start, but the "Dragonrider" stories started out in Analog, for God's sake, as SF, competing for the Hugo with all the other SF stories, and the author herself denied indignantly for years the idea that they were fantasy rather than science fiction. To find these series suddenly an unquestioned part of the fantasy genre instead, as if they'd always been there, is a bit unnerving, smacking of historical revisionism.) Sirens and other Daemon Lovers (HarperPrism), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling is also a fairly substantial anthology, although still considerably less so than Legends; a book of "erotic tales of magical, obsessional, and irresistible love," it could be considered to be either a fantasy anthology or a horror anthology depending on how you wink at it (it struck me, arbitrarily, as being a shade more fantasy than horror, which is why I'm listing it here, although there is also a good deal of moderately grotesque horror in it as well). The erotic element in the stories here is strong and unambiguous, making it one of the most "adult" (i.e., dirtiest) books of the year, although the stories themselves sometimes give you the impression that they've been created as a vehicle for carrying the erotic scenes rather than because of any intrinsic story that the author really wanted to tell. There is good work here, though, by Tanith Lee, Pat Murphy, Michael Swanwick, Delia Sherman, Brian Stableford, Jane Yolen, Kelly Eskridge, and others. "Pleasant but minor," a phrase used to describe Alien Pets, above, could also be used to describe most of the rest of the year's original fantasy anthologies (which, in some cases, were more minor than pleasant). Warrior Princesses (DAW), edited by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough and Martin H. Greenberg, features interesting work by Jane Yolen, Bruce Holland Rogers, Megan Lindholm, Janet Berliner, Esther Friesner, and others. Olympus (DAW), edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Bruce D. Arthurs, features interesting work by Esther Friesner, Jane Yolen, Lawrence Watt-Evans, and others. Black Cats and Broken Mirrors (DAW), edited by Martin H. Greenberg and John Helfers, features interesting work by Bruce Holland Rogers, Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, Charles de Lint, Michelle West, Nancy Springer, and others. Battle Magic (DAW), edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Larry Segriff, features interesting work by Lois Tilton, Ed Gorman, John De Chancie, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Michelle West, Charles de Lint, and others. And Camelot Fantastic (DAW), edited by Lawrence Schimel and Martin H. Greenberg, features interesting work by Ian McDowell, Brian Stableford, Nancy Springer, Mike Ashley, Rosemary Edghill, and others. Occasionally a story here thrusts itself up to a higher level than its fellows ("Thirteen Ways to Water," by Bruce Holland Rogers in Black Cats and Broken Mirrors; "Strays," by Megan Lindholm and "Becoming a Warrior" by Jane Yolen in Warrior Princesses; "The Miracle of Salamis," by Lois Tilton in Battle Magic; and "The Feasting of the Hungry Man," by Ian McDowell and "The Architect of Worlds," by Brian Stableford in Camelot Fantastic), but for the most part the stories

are pleasant but minor at best, just minor at worst. The best of these overall, especially if you like Arthurian fantasy, is probably Camelot Fantastic, followed by Warrior Princesses. Other original fantasy anthologies this year included Did You Say Chicks? (Baen), edited by Esther M. Friesner, On Crusade: More Tales of the Knights Templar (Warner Aspect), edited by Katherine Kurtz, and Mob Magic (DAW), edited by Brian Thomsen and Martin H. Greenberg. I'm not following the horror field closely these days, but the most prominent original horror anthology of the year would seem to be Dark Terrors 4 (Gollancz), edited by Stephen Jones, followed by Sirens and other Daemon Lovers, if you list it as a horror anthology instead of a fantasy anthology. (Dreaming Down-Under, which contains a lot of horror material, should probably be considered in here somewhere as well.) Other original horror anthologies this year included In the Shadow of the Gargoyle (Ace), edited by Nancy Kilpatrick and Thomas S. Roche; Robert Bloch's Psychos (Pocket), edited by Robert Bloch; Horrors! 365 Scary Stories (Barnes & Noble), edited by Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, Robert Weinberg, and Martin H. Greenberg; Going Postal (Space & Time), edited by Gerard D. Houraner; and Hot Blood X (Pocket), edited by Jeff Gelb and Michael Garrett. As you can see, there were a lot of anthologies published this year, but only a few, such as Starlight 2 and Legends, of any real quality. As for the rest, although you may well find some of these books entertaining enough to be worth the money you spend on them, especially with the cheaper ones that are only $5.99 a shot, the money you'd need to buy all of them still adds up to a substantial amount. You could take that same amount of money and use it to buy subscriptions to several SF/fantasy magazines instead (if you don't like Asimov's, try Interzone and F&SF, or Science Fiction Age and Realms of Fantasy), with a far greater assurance of actually getting your money's worth of good stories during the course of the year— but, of course, since I'm a magazine editor myself, this suggestion can be dismissed as self-serving. *** Despite several years of gloomy recessionary talk (and recent panicky chatter about the imminent Death of Science Fiction), the novel market appeared to be on the rebound in 1998 after two years of decline, with last year's cutbacks at houses like HarperCollins being more than compensated for by the founding of major new SF lines at places such as Avon and Simon & Schuster UK. Although the ways in which science fiction typically gets published continue to alter— mass-market paperback originals, for instance, which once made up the bulk of the field, continued to dwindle, hitting a thirteen-year low in 1998, part of a trend away from mass-market that has persisted for the past several years, while the percentage of titles that are now being done in hardcover or trade paperback instead continued to grow, with original hardcover titles up 21% and original trade paperback titles up 23%— the overall totals of novels published not only held their own rather than slumping disastrously, as had been predicted, but showed some significant growth. According to the newsmagazine Locus, there were 1,959 books "of interest to the SF field," both original and reprint, published in 1998, up 8% from the total of 1,816 such books in 1997, an increase after two years of decline which comes close to reaching the record total of 1,990 in 1991. Original books were up to 1,122 titles, a strong 12% gain over last year's total of 999. The number of new SF novels was up, with 242 novels published as opposed to 229 in 1997 (although still a bit down from the total of 253 in

1996), fantasy was up, with 233 novels published as opposed to 220 in 1997 (the highest total since 234 in 1994), and horror managed to halt and even turn around slightly the precipitous drops it's been suffering since 1995, publishing 110 novels in 1998 as opposed to 106 in 1997 (still down considerably from its high of 193 titles in 1995, though). So, 1998 was not a record year, perhaps, but neither does it show anything like the kind of recessionary, total bust, through-the-floor disastrous crash in overall numbers that some of our gloomier pundits were forecasting. In fact, overall totals are trending up, not down, as we near the new century ahead. *** As usual, I haven't had time to read many novels this year, and so can contribute no really definitive overview, but of those I have seen, Mission Child, Maureen F. McHugh (Avon Eos), The Alien Years, Robert Silverberg (HarperPrism), Distraction, Bruce Sterling (Bantam Spectra), The Golden Globe, John Varley (Ace), Tea from an Empty Cup, Pat Cadigan (Tor), Kirinyaga (if considered as a novel rather than a collection, as Resnick insists it should be considered), Mike Resnick (Del Rey), Ports of Call, Jack Vance (Tor), and To Say Nothing of the Dog, Connie Willis (Bantam Spectra), alone should be sufficient to indicate that 1998 was a fairly good year for novels. Other novels that have received a lot of attention and acclaim in 1998 include: Starfarers, Poul Anderson (Tor); A Clash of Kings, George R. R. Martin (Bantam Spectra); Cosm, Gregory Benford (Avon Eos); Parable of the Talents, Octavia E. Butler (Seven Stories); Dinosaur Summer, Greg Bear (Warner Aspect); Maximum Light, Nancy Kress (Tor); Moonseed, Stephen Baxter (HarperPrism); Flanders, Patricia Anthony (Ace); Kirinya, Ian McDonald (Gollancz); Darwinia, Robert Charles Wilson (Tor); Children of God, Mary Doria Russell (Villard); Child of the River, Paul J. McAuley (Avon Eos); Deepdrive, Alexander Jablokov (Avon Eos); Proxies, Laura J. Mixon (Tor); Mockingbird , Sean Stewart (Ace); Earth Made of Glass, John Barnes (Tor); Vast, Linda Nagata (Bantam Spectra); Bloom, Wil McCarthy (Del Rey); The Children Star, Joan Slonczewski (Tor); Irrational Fears, William Browning Spencer (White Wolf); Inherit the Earth, Brian Stableford (Tor); Girl in Landscape, Jonathan Lethem (Doubleday Anchor); Prince of Dogs, Kate Elliot (DAW); The Cassini Division, Ken MacLeod (Orbit); O Pioneer!, Frederik Pohl (Tor); Mother of Plenty, Colin Greenland (Avon); Dragon's Winter, Elizabeth A. Lynn (Ace); Dreaming in Smoke, Tricia Sullivan (Bantam Spectra); Inversions, Iain M. Banks (Orbit); Playing God, Sarah Zettel (Warner); The Centurion's Empire, Sean McMullen (Tor); Newton's Cannon, J. Gregory Keyes (Del Rey); Six Moon Dance, Sheri S. Tepper (Avon Eos); Climb the Wind, Pamela Sargent (HarperPrism); The One-Armed Queen, Jane Yolen (Tor); Bag of Bones, Stephen King (Scribner); and Faces Under Water, Tanith Lee (Overlook). (The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc., Lewis Hollow Road, Woodstock, New York 12498— $23.95 for Faces Under Water, Tanith Lee.) Jack Vance's Ports of Call is not as good as 1996's The Night Lamp (Vance is never at his best when he succumbs to the picaresque plot, and here he's so picaresque that there's hardly any plot at all), but deserves a special mention anyway for the richness of imagination, imagery, and invention that he displays here, and for Vance's deadpan humor and dour irony, something often overlooked and underrated by critics, although Ports of Call makes it clear that P. G. Wodehouse is one of Vance's most important literary ancestors. I'd also like to single out for praise Greg Bear's Dinosaur Summer for managing to do successfully what a number of other authors have tried and failed to do in recent years, writing a Young Adult SF novel that manages to be good science fiction and entertaining enough to hold the interest of younger readers, all at the same time. The field desperately needs more such books, the '90s equivalent of the so-called juvenile novels by Robert A. Heinlein and Andre Norton that addicted whole generations

of readers to science fiction in the '50s and '60s; if we had them, perhaps fewer young readers would be inclined to turn to Star Trek and Star Wars novels instead for the kind of fast, "fun" read they're looking for. A few conscious attempts have been made in the last couple of years to duplicate the Heinlein-style "juvenile," but they've mostly been faintly dull and weighted down with heavy indigestible lumps of stodgy libertarian polemic. Bear has avoided this trap and instead written a rousing, vivid story about a boy's adventures with living dinosaurs that I certainly would have appreciated when I was fourteen. More power to him. (It would make a great movie, too, if anybody bothered to make good kid's movies anymore.) Special mention should also be made of an odd item, Psychoshop (Vintage), an uncompleted novel by the late Alfred Bester that was finished by Roger Zelazny just before his own tragic death— alas, this is more of interest for nostalgic value than as a successful novel on its own terms, although flashes of the vivid prose styles of both authors do shine through here and there. Mention should also be made of an omnibus reissue of three classic novels of space travel, A. E. van Vogt's Voyage of the Space Beagle, Barry N. Malzberg's Galaxies, and Poul Anderson's The Enemy Stars, all packaged together in one book as Three in Space (White Wolf), edited by Jack Dann, Pamela Sargent, and George Zebrowski; get them while— fleetingly— they're available again. The first novels that seemed to attract the most attention and arouse the most heat this year were Halfway Human (Avon Eos), by Carolyn Ives Gilman, and Brown Girl in the Ring (Warner Aspect), by Nalo Hopkinson. Also getting a fair amount of comment were Dawn Song, Michael Marano (Tor); The Iron Bridge, David Morse (Harcourt Brace); Silk, Caitlín R. Kiernan (Roc); Green Rider, Kristen Britain (DAW); The Last Dragonlord, Joanne Bertin (Tor); and A Scientific Romance, Ronald Wright (Picador USA). Tor, Roc, Harcourt Brace, and Avon Eos all published several first novels this year, and are to be commended for it, as all publishers should be who are willing to publish first novels, taking a chance on unknown writers with no track record, a very risky proposition— it's a chance that must be taken by someone, though, if the genre is going to continue to grow ... or even to survive. It seemed like a pretty good year for novels to me, even if I only actually got to read a handful of them. Avon Eos produced an impressive lineup in its first year of existence under the new imprint, and Tor, Bantam Spectra, and HarperPrism had strong years as well. As has been true more often than not in the last five or six years, there's plenty of hardcore, sure-enough, pure-quill science fiction here, with perhaps the majority of titles fitting into that category— giving the lie to the tired old line about how nobody publishes "real" science fiction anymore; read the Sterling, the Varley, the Baxter, the McHugh, the Jablokov, the Anderson, the McDonald, the Stableford, the Cadigan, the Silverberg, or a dozen of the others, and then come back and tell me that— but there's also plenty of fine fantasy of many different types, from George R. R. Martin's A Clash of Kings to Sean Stewart's Mockingbird, with plenty of room left over for harder-to-classify stuff that mixes several different genres, such as William Browning Spencer's Irrational Fears, Jonathan Lethem's Girl in Landscape, or Patricia Anthony's Flanders. In fact, it's amazing just how wide the spectrum of first-rate work being produced today really is— chances are, no matter what your tastes are, from hard SF to high fantasy, you'll find something you like out there somewhere. As usual, predicting what's going to take the major awards this year is a daunting task. Connie Willis's To Say Nothing of the Dog might have a shot at the Nebula Award, unless last year's Hugo winner, Joe Haldeman's Forever Peace (still eligible for this year's Nebulas under SFWA's bizarre "rolling eligibility" rule) takes it away from her. It's much too early to call the Hugo contest, I'm afraid, although the fact that the Worldcon is taking place in Australia this year may end up skewing the voting results to some degree. A borderline novel by an SF writer (mainstream with a few touches that could be construed as mild fantastic elements) that may be of interest to some is 253 (St. Martin's Griffin), by Geoff Ryman, the "print remix" of an "interactive hypertext novel" that Ryman ran on his Web site, one of the most

successful examples to date of electronically published fiction that utilizes "hypertext" features. The novel examines in fascinating detail 253 passengers who are taking a fateful seven-and-a-half-minute ride on a London Underground tube train. It has very little plot, instead devoting a page to a description of each of the characters (including internal thoughts, fears, and aspirations), each description exactly 253 words long— this sounds boring and awful, I know, but in practice it has a great fascination, simply because of Ryman's huge abilities as an author and prose stylist. It's probably better to read a section at a time rather than trying to read the "novel" in one sitting (this format supposedly worked better online, where you could jump from one character description to the other, and also read the hypertext footnotes, in any order you chose— but here, the very fact that it's in print, pages bound in a book, imposes a certain structure on the text, like it or not). The character descriptions are fascinating, rich and detailed and vivid, and the book is often quite funny (particularly in the "hypertext" bits— mock advertisements, "reader satisfaction surveys," and so forth— with which Ryman surrounds the character-description capsules), although there's a pervasive underlying tang of bitterness and sorrowing compassion for the everyday tragedies of life. (Buried and rather lost in the midst of all this is the idea of Anne Frank as the modern-day incarnation of the Wandering Jew— something that immediately resonated with me and gave me the frisson of witnessing a new myth being created before my very eyes ... or what might become a new myth if enough people read this book— probably, alas, a rather unlikely scenario.) All of this gave me a slight feeling of immense skills and talents being utilized to create something that is not quite worth the time and effort that went into it, like watching Michaelangelo make a Jello sculpture— nevertheless, although I wouldn't want to see Ryman spend the rest of his career turning out this sort of thing, 253 is definitely worth the cover price, and I think I can safely say that you're unlikely to come across anything else even remotely like it anywhere else this year. Another eccentric and highly eclectic performance, dancing on the borderline between horror, fantasy, and what almost might be called "imaginary scholarship" is the posthumously published The Boss in the Wall, A Treatise on the House Devil (Tachyon Publications), by Avram Davidson and Grania Davis, a short novel completed by Grania Davis from rough drafts Avram Davidson left behind after his death; the plot here is rather sketchy, but the material dealt with in the book is rich and strange enough (and creepy enough), all served up with Davidson's wonderfully flavorful and idiosyncratic prose, that few readers will feel that they haven't gotten more than their money's worth. (The Boss in the Wall, A Treatise on the House Devil— $12 from Tachyon Publications, 1459 18th St. #139, San Francisco, CA 94107.) Blue Light (Little, Brown), by Walter Mosley, represents the first foray into science fiction by this best-selling mystery writer, and although it was largely slammed by genre critics, may still be of interest to Mosley fans. Associational novels by genre authors this year included a Gothic suspense novel by Kate Wilhelm, The Good Children (St. Martin's), Philip José Farmer's noir novel Nothing Burns in Hell (Forge), and mystery novels by Ron Goulart, Groucho Marx, Master Detective (St. Martin's) and by James Sallis, Bluebottle (Walker). *** It was a good year for collections, especially in the area of retrospective collections that return long-unavailable work by dead (and in danger of being unjustly forgotten) authors to print. The best of these retrospective collections, as well as being the best collection of the year and one of the best collections of the decade, was The Avram Davidson Treasury: A Tribute Collection (Tor), by Avram Davidson, edited by Robert Silverberg and Grania Davis, a well-named trove of long-out-of-print material by a man who was one of SF and fantasy's best (and most underrated) writers. First Contacts: The Essential Murray Leinster (NESFA Press), by Murray Leinster, edited by Joe Rico, An Ornament to His Profession (NESFA Press), by Charles L. Harness, The Perfect Host: The

Complete Short Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, Vol. 5 (North Atlantic), by Theodore Sturgeon, Farewell to Lankhmar (White Wolf), by Fritz Leiber, and Collected Fictions (Viking), by Jorge Luis Borges also belong in the library of any serious student of the genre. First-rate collections by more contemporary writers this year included Beaker's Dozen, Nancy Kress (Tor); Luminous, Greg Egan (Millennium); The Invisible Country, Paul J. McAuley (Avon Eos); Frankensteins and Foreign Devils, Walter Jon Williams (NESFA Press); The Moon Maid and Other Fantastic Adventures, R. Garcia y Robertson (Golden Gryphon); Kirinyaga (if considered as a collection— where most commentators placed it— instead of a novel), Mike Resnick (Del Rey); A Second Chance at Eden, Peter F. Hamilton (Warner); Black Glass, Karen Joy Fowler (Holt); and Traces, by Stephen Baxter (Voyager). Other strong collections included: Last Summer at Mars Hill, Elizabeth Hand (HarperPrism); Lost Pages, Paul Di Filippo (Four Walls Eight Windows); The Night We Buried Road Dog, Jack Cady (DreamHaven); Smoke and Mirrors, Neil Gaiman (Avon); One Day Closer to Death, Bradley Denton (St. Martin's Press); Extremities, Kathe Koja (Four Walls Eight Windows); Weird Women, Wired Women, Kit Reed (Wesleyan); This Is the Year Zero, Andrew Weiner (Pottersfield Press); Moonlight and Vines, Charles de Lint (Tor); Reave the Just and Other Tales, Stephen R. Donaldson (Bantam Spectra) ; Black Butterflies: A Flock on the Dark Side, John Shirley (Zeising); Burning Sky, Rachel Pollack (Cambrian); and The Cleft and Other Odd Tales, Gahan Wilson (Tor). It's worth noting that just one story in the Hamilton collection, the title story, "A Second Chance at Eden," is all by itself longer than many of the novels I remember from my childhood— well over 50,000 words long— and that it would have been in this collection if I could have found room for it, but that it was too long even for me to be able to handle, even with all the space I have to fill! The Hamilton collection is unusually hefty for a contemporary collection, and thus a good reading bargain. An unusual item is The Alchemy of Love (Triple Tree Publishing), by Elizabeth Engstrom and Alan M. Clark, an art book/collection, eight stories by Engstrom and eight pieces of art by Clark, with four stories by Engstrom based on Clark's artwork, and four artworks by Clark based on Engstrom's stories. (A similar gimmick is used in the anthology Imagination Fully Dilated— see below— in which stories by various authors are based on Clark's artwork.) Small presses like NESFA Press, DreamHaven, and Golden Gryphon Press remain important (with NESFA particularly vital for the retrospective collections full of older, long-out-of-print stuff), but it's encouraging to see both middle-level trade publishers such as Four Walls Eight Windows and big commercial houses such as Tor, St. Martin's, HarperPrism, Warner, Avon, Bantam Spectra, Del Rey, Holt, and Avon Eos taking a chance with short-story collections again, especially after so many years in the '80s and early '90s when they mostly did not. (Very few small-press titles will be findable in the average bookstore, or even in the average chain store, which means that mail order is your best bet, and so I'm going to list the addresses of the small-press publishers mentioned above: NESFA Press, P.O. Box 809, Framingham, MA 01701-0203— $25 for First Contacts: The Essential Murray Leinster, by Murray Leinster, $25 for An Ornament to His Profession, by Charles L. Harness, and $23 for Frankensteins and Foreign Devils, by Walter Jon Williams; Golden Gryphon Press, 364 West Country Lane, Collinsville, IL 62234— $22.95 for The Moon Maid and Other Fantastic Adventures, by R. Garcia y Robertson; North Atlantic Books, P.O. Box 12327, Berkeley, CA, 94701— $25 for The Perfect Host: Volume V: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, by Theodore Sturgeon; Pottersfield Press, Lawrencetown Beach, 83 Leslie Road, East Lawrencetown, Nova Scotia, Canada B2Z 1P8— $16.95 for This Is the Year Zero, by Andrew Weiner; University Press of New England/Wesleyan, 23 South Main St., Hanover, NH 03755—

$16.95 plus $2.50 postage for Weird Women, Wired Women, by Kit Reed; Cambrian Publications, P.O. Box 112170, Campbell, CA 95011-2170— $34 for Burning Sky, by Rachel Pollack; TripleTree Publishing, P.O. Box 5684, Eugene, OR 97405— $49.95 plus $5.00 postage for The Alchemy of Love, by Alan M. Clark and Elizabeth Engstrom; DreamHaven Books, 912 West Lake St., Minneapolis, NM 55408— $27 for The Night We Buried Road Dog, by Jack Cady; Mark V. Ziesing, P.O. Box 76, Shingletown, CA 96088— $16.95 for Black Butterflies: A Flock on the Dark Side, by John Shirley.) *** There was some good solid stuff in the reprint anthology field this year, although perhaps no single especially impressive blockbuster volume, of the sort that has turned up occasionally in other years. As usual, the best bets for your money in this category were the various "Best of the Year" anthologies, and the annual Nebula Award anthology, Nebula Awards 32 (Harcourt Brace), edited by Jack Dann. Science fiction is now being covered by two "Best of the Year" anthology series, the one you are holding in your hand, and the Year's Best SF series (HarperPrism), edited by David G. Hartwell, now up to its fourth annual volume. It would be inappropriate for me to review Hartwell's Year's Best SF, since it's a direct competitor to this volume, and anything critical I might have to say about it could be seen as suspect and self-serving— but, in general, I think that the relatively small amount of overlap between my selections and Hartwell's demonstrates that the field is wide enough for there to be more than one Best anthology every year, and that it's probably a healthy thing for the genre for there to be more than one. Since no anthology can be big enough or comprehensive enough to include all the worthwhile SF of different varieties that comes out in the course of a year, having two volumes gives more authors a chance to be showcased every year, and the parallax provided by comparing Hartwell's slant on what was the year's best fiction to my own slant may be informative. A somewhat more specialized kind of Best of the Year anthology, running a year behind mine and Hartwell's, and including fantasy, horror, and some harder-to-classify literary surrealism as well as science fiction, is a new series called The Year's Best Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy (HarperCollins Australia Voyager), edited by Jonathan Strahan and Jeremy G. Byrne, now up to Volume Two. There were two Best of the Year anthologies covering horror in 1998: the latest edition in the British series The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror (Robinson), edited by Stephen Jones, now up to Volume 9, and the Ellen Datlow half of a huge volume covering both horror and fantasy, The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror (St. Martin's Press), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, this year up to its Eleventh Annual Collection. Fantasy, as opposed to horror, is still only covered by the Windling half of the Datlow/Windling anthology, a surprising lapse considering how popular fantasy is these days. Turning to retrospective SF anthologies, books that provide a historical/critical overview of the evolution of the field, there was nothing as strong as last year's A Science Fiction Century or the similarly titled A Century of Science Fiction 1950— 1959, but solid value and some interesting insights on SF from outside the familiar American perspective are provided by The Road to Science Fiction Volume 5: The British Way (White Wolf) and The Road to Science Fiction Volume 6: Around the World (White Wolf), both edited by James Gunn. Noted without comment is The Good Old Stuff (St. Martin's Griffin), edited by Gardner Dozois, a retrospective overview of the evolution of "Adventure SF" from the '40s to the '70s. There were also some good singleton reprint SF anthologies this year. In spite of its silly title, the best of these might be Flying Cups and Saucers: Gender Explorations in Science Fiction and Fantasy

(Edgewood Press), edited by Debbie Notkin and "the Secret Feminist Cabal," being referred to informally by most commentators as "the Tiptree Award anthology"— appropriately enough, since it assembles thirteen stories from among the winners and the stories "shortlisted" for the Tiptree Award (the award for the most effective "exploration of genre roles" in SF and fantasy) since its inception in 1991. It makes for an impressive list, including first-rate stories such as Ursula K. Le Guin's "Forgiveness Day" and "The Matter of Seggri," Eleanor Arnason's "The Lovers," R. Garcia y Robertson's "The Other Magpie," Lisa Tuttle's "Food Man," Delia Sherman's "Young Woman in a Garden," Ian R. MacLeod's "Grownups," and a half-dozen others, almost all of which will make you think, often about things that don't get thought about much. (Edgewood Press, P.O. Box 380264, Cambridge, MA 02238— $17 for a trade paperback, $38.50 for a hardcover edition for Flying Cups and Saucers: Gender Explorations in Science Fiction and Fantasy.) The Playboy Book of Science Fiction (HarperPrism), edited by Alice K. Turner, turns out to be surprisingly substantial as well, though, and gives Flying Cups and Saucers a decent run for its money; in addition to the lighter satirical/comic stuff you might expect, the anthology also reprints some powerful and sobering tales such as Damon Knight's "Masks," Arthur C. Clarke's "Transit of Earth," Ursula K. Le Guin's "Nine Lives," Joe Haldeman's "More Than the Sum of His Parts," Howard Waldrop's "Heirs of the Perisphere," Lucius Shepard's "Fire Zone Emerald," and many others (including, of course, the above-mentioned satirical/comic stuff, by an array of practiced hands from Vonnegut to Effinger to Bisson, which will increase the entertainment value of the book for most readers). Another solid grouping of stories is to be found in Future on Ice (Tor), edited by Orson Scott Card, the long-delayed sequel to 1991's Future on Fire. (Ironically, considering the title, the book has been sitting around "on ice" for almost a decade, and it shows its age sometimes. Whether the storynotes are new or years old is hard to tell for sure from internal evidence; if they're old, then they should have been replaced; if they're new, however, then in them Card inadvertently paints a rather sad portrait of himself as a man clearly still deeply embroiled in fighting the Cyberpunk Wars of the mid-'80s, taking potshots at his enemies and obviously at times himself feeling the throbbing of old wounds— a display of passion and choler that looks rather quaint and dusty, like arguing over which end of the egg to break, here at the end of the '90s, at a time when most young readers are probably not even aware that there were any Cyberpunk Wars, let alone who the participants were or what issues they were fighting over. It may be possible to argue with Card's highly charged and deliberately provocative polemics in the front matter and storynotes here— and, indeed, I've heard many people, including some of the book's authors, doing just that— but it's hard to argue with the quality of most of the stories reprinted inside, including John Kessel's "The Pure Product," John Crowley's "Snow," Nancy Kress's "Out of All Them Bright Stars," Greg Bear's "Blood Music," Lisa Goldstein's "Tourists," Walter Jon Williams's "Dinosaurs," Card's own "The Fringe," and almost a dozen others, all also of high quality. The Best of Crank! (Tor), edited by Bryan Cholfin, comes along, ironically, just as the idiosyncratic semi-prozine from which its stories are drawn, Crank!, has been officially pronounced dead (see magazine section, above); this anthology gives a good representative cross section of the kind of thing for which the magazine was known, quirky, offbeat stories that often tried consciously (sometimes too hard) to avoid easy genre classification, always ambitious, sometimes pretentious, often full of in-your-face Attitude— the best story here by far, and the best thing Crank! ever published, is Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Matter of Seggri," but the book also features good (and idiosyncratic) work by Eliot Fintushel, Jonathan Lethem, Lisa Tuttle, Michael Bishop, Gwyneth Jones, R. A. Lafferty, and others. Tales in Space (White Wolf), edited by Peter Crowther, provides a solid grouping of, well, tales in space, including first-rate work by Paul J. McAuley, Ursula K. Le Guin, John Varley, Brian W. Aldiss, and others. The Reel Stuff (DAW) edited by Brian Thomson and Martin H. Greenberg, provides an unusual twist, reprinting the original short stories from which SF movies and TV shows have later been made— not surprisingly, most of them were better in the original print versions than in their later film incarnations, including William Gibson's "Johnny Mnemonic," George R. R. Martin's "Sandkings" and "Nightflyers," John Varley's "Air Raid," and Philip K. Dick's "Second Variety" and "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale," all making for a worthwhile reading experience.

Noted without comment are Clones (Ace), edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois, Immortals (Ace), edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois, Nanotech (Ace), edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois, the Alternate History anthology Roads Not Taken (Del Rey), edited by Gardner Dozois and Stanley Schmidt, and Isaac Asimov's Detectives (Ace), edited by Gardner Dozois and Sheila Williams. There were also some good values in the reprint fantasy anthology market this year, a sort of anthology that has been thinly represented in recent times. Although it received scathing criticism from some critics for concentrating too much on American genre fantasy and not including enough European and academically oriented fantasy, I doubt that too many readers are going to be bothered by this to any significant degree when they dip into The Fantasy Hall of Fame (HarperPrism), edited by Robert Silverberg, and find it chock-full of stories by writers such as L. Sprague de Camp, Jack Vance, Fritz Leiber, Tanith Lee, Ursula K. Le Guin, Terry Bisson, Roger Zelazny, Avram Davidson, Ray Bradbury, and twenty-one other first-rate authors. I suppose that it is skewed heavily toward American genre fantasy, probably not a big surprise when you realize that it was largely selected by vote of the membership of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and I agree that a volume titled "The Fantasy Hall of Fame" probably should have made an effort to include different sorts of fantasy and cast its net further afield— the ordinary reader, though, who's merely looking to find the most good reading for his money that he can, will probably not be all that concerned about such matters ... and considered in that light, value received for money paid, this enormous anthology of mostly good-to-excellent stories for a cover price of $14 is one of the best reading bargains of the year. (This has been a good year for Silverberg the Fantasy Anthology editor, a hat he doesn't often wear— he's edited the best original fantasy anthology of the year and the best reprint fantasy anthology of the year; not too shabby!) Other good fantasy reprint anthologies this year included two solid volumes of comic fantasy, a specialized subgenre even rarer than reprint fantasy anthologies in general— a big, well-named mostly reprint (with a few originals) volume called The Mammoth Book of Comic Fantasy (Carroll & Graf), edited by Mike Ashley, featuring good work by Esther Friesner, Terry Prachett, Avram Davidson, Neil Gaiman, Terry Bisson, Jane Yolen, and many others, and The Flying Sorcerers (Ace), edited by Peter Haining, with good (and mostly older) reprint stories by P. G. Wodehouse, John Collier, L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, Angela Carter, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Roald Dahl, Robert Bloch, Nelson Bond, and many others. Noted without comment is Isaac Asimov's Camelot (Ace), edited by Gardner Dozois and Sheila Williams. Reprint anthologies seem even rarer in horror, where most of the anthologies are originals. The best reprint horror anthology I saw this year— although, in fairness, I should say that I didn't search assiduously for them— was Eternal Lovecraft: The Persistence of HPL in Popular Culture (Golden Gryphon), edited by Jim Turner, a smart and solid anthology of Lovecraft-inspired work that gives some fresh, inventive, and eclectic twists to this familiar material, by writers such as Ian R. MacLeod, Fritz Leiber, Gene Wolfe, Stephen King, Steve Utley and Howard Waldrop, Harlan Ellison, Robert Charles Wilson, and others. Other reprint horror anthologies this year included: Mistresses of the Dark: 25 Macabre Tales by Master Storytellers (Barnes & Noble), edited by Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, Denise Little, and Robert Weinberg; 100 Twisted Little Tales of Torment (Barnes & Noble), edited by Stefan Dziemianowicz, Robert Weinberg, and Martin H. Greenberg; The Best of Cemetery Dance (Cemetery Dance Publications), edited by Richard Chizmar; Fields of Blood: Vampire Stories of the Heartland (Cumberland House), edited by Lawrence Schimel and Martin H. Greenberg; and Streets of Blood: Vampire Stories from New York City (Cumberland House), edited by Lawrence Schimel and Martin H. Greenberg. I'm not watching horror closely anymore, so no doubt there are some I've missed. An offbeat small press item is Stranger Kaddish (Aardwolf Publishing), edited by Jim Reeber and

Clifford Lawrence Meth, a follow-up to last year's Strange Kaddish, another anthology of Jewish science fiction featuring work by Harlan Ellison, Neil Gaiman, and others. (Aardwolf Publishing, 45 Park Place South, suite 270, Morristown, NJ 07960— $12.95 for Stranger Kaddish.) *** It was a relatively quiet year in the SF-and-fantasy-oriented nonfiction and reference book field, with nothing published anywhere near as substantial as last year's mammoth The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. The closest we came to this level of quality this year is The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Fantasy: The Definitive Illustrated Guide (Carlton), edited by David Pringle, which has plenty of useful and entertaining information, but lacks the scope, comprehensiveness, and heft of Clute and Grant's Encyclopedia of Fantasy. The critical book that aroused the most comment— and controversy— was undoubtedly Thomas M. Disch's sharp-edged and deliberately provocative study of science fiction and popular culture, The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World (Free Press); I disagree with many if not most of Disch's theoretical conclusions about the nature of and the future of SF, and he gets a fair number of his facts wrong, but Disch is so entertainingly bitchy, witty, and acid-tongued in many places here that it's hard to deny the overall appeal of the book as mean-spirited fun, especially when he's attacking bloated media darlings such as Whitley Streiber, upon whom he performs a spectacular hatchet job. Drier, more academically oriented reference books included that invaluable research tool, Hugo, Nebula and World Fantasy Awards (Advent), by Howard DeVore, Science-Fiction: The Gernsback Years (Kent State), by Everett F. Bleiler, and the St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost & Gothic Writers (St. James), edited by David Pringle. Books about writers included The Tall Adventurer: The Works of E. C. Tubb (Beacon), by Sean Wallace and Philip Harbottle, Lovecraft Remembered (Arkham House), edited by Peter Cannon, The Works of Jack Williamson: An Annotated Bibliography and Guide (NESFA Press), by Richard A. Hauptmann, and British Fantasy and Science Fiction Writers Before World War I (Gale), edited by Darren Harris-Fain. Northern Dreamers: Interviews with Famous Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Writers (Quarry Press), by Edo van Belkom, is a book of interviews with various Canadian writers, and Windows of the Imagination (Borgo), by Darrell Schweitzer, is a book of essays by a well-known genre critic. There were also two books of reminiscences by writers this year: Lemady: Episodes of a Writer's Life (Borgo), by Keith Roberts, and Writer at Large (Gryphon), by Richard A. Lupoff. The Roberts is particularly recommended as a vivid, if sometimes depressing, look at life in the publishing world by one of the most significant talents of the '60s. (Borgo Press, PO Box 2845, San Bernardino, CA 92406-2845— $21 plus $3 shipping for Lemady: Episodes of a Writer's Life, by Keith Roberts; Gryphon Publications, P.O. Box 209, Brooklyn NY 11228-0209— $15 for Writer at Large, by Richard A. Lupoff.) An interesting book of correspondence by two very dissimilar writers is Arthur C. Clarke and Lord Dunsany: A Correspondence (Anamensis Press). The art book field also seemed weaker this year, or at least it didn't come anywhere near producing anything as comprehensive and valuable as last year's retrospective survey of science fiction art, Infinite Worlds: The Fantastic Visions of Science Fiction Art. The closest approach in quality, and the art book to buy if you're only going to buy one SF art book this year, is Pulp Culture: The Art of Fiction Magazines (Collectors Press), by Frank M. Robinson and Lawrence Davidson, which not only features lots of beautiful reproductions of old pulp magazine covers, but an overview of the evolution of pulp magazines as well.

The latest edition of a sort of "Best of the Year" series that compiles the year's fantastic art, Spectrum 5: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art (Underwood), edited by Arnie Fenner and Cathy Fenner, provides a valuable overview of what's happening in the current SF and fantasy art scene. An overview of the career of an individual artist, one of the most famous in modern fantastic art, is to be found in Icon: A Retrospective by the Grand Master of Fantastic Art, Frank Frazetta (Underwood), also edited by Arnie and Cathy Fenner. Similar retrospective overviews are offered by The Fantastic Art of Beksinski (Morpheus International) and H. R. Giger's Retrospective 1964-1984 (Morpheus International), while Wayne Barlowe takes us on a harrowing journey through Hell in Barlowe's Inferno (Morpheus International). Everyone who loved Brian Froud's famous art book Faeries (as I did), will want his new cut through the same mythic material, Good Faeries/Bad Faeries (Simon & Schuster), edited by Terri Windling, where half of the book is printed upside-down to distinguish the good faeries from the bad faeries; Froud's rendering here is as luminous and beautifully evocative as ever, but the book at times becomes much too twee: "the credit card faery lurks in cash dispensers ..." Give me a break! The cuteness level here ought to have been turned down several notches, and will be too much for some readers, but the art is often stunning, which I suppose is the real selling point. Comics fans will probably want Dustcovers: The Collected Sandman Covers (DC/Vertigo), by Dave McKean. An offbeat item is Imagination Fully Dilated (Cemetery Dance Publications), edited by Alan M. Clark and Elizabeth Engstrom (see also the original anthology section, above), an anthology of stories by writers such as Poppy Z. Brite, Lucy Taylor, Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tem, and twenty-five others, all inspired by the horror art of Alan M. Clark, which is included as tipped-in color plates, so that the book functions either as a horror anthology or as an art book, depending on which factor you choose to emphasize. There weren't a lot of general genre-related nonfiction books of interest this year. The strongest, and my personal favorite, was The Life of Birds (Princeton University Press), by David Attenborough, a fascinating and richly detailed examination of the lifeways and evolutionary strategies of birds, including behaviors much more alien than those exhibited by most SF writers' aliens; SF writers, in fact, could do worse than to dip into this endlessly surprising book for inspiration. Another intriguing book, offering us the science fictional kick of suddenly reevaluating known facts from an entirely new perspective, is The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-Line Pioneers (Walker), by Tom Standage, which argues cogently that almost all of the culture- and mind-set-altering effects and social changes driven by the Internet today were anticipated in the Victorian Age by the introduction of the telegraph: "A world-wide communications network whose cables spanned continents and oceans, it revolutionized business practice, gave rise to new forms of crime, and inundated its users with a deluge of information." As Standage points out, it even changed courtship patterns, with lovers meeting and marrying "online," and spurred the development of cryptology, as businessmen tried to come up with codes to protect the privacy of information sent by telegraph, and other businessmen tried to crack those codes to gain a business advantage. (Standage also points out that the effect of this technology on the Victorians was perhaps even greater than the effect of the Internet on society today, since they went in one jump from a world where messages took months to cross the oceans to a world of instant communications where such messages could be received in minutes: "If any generation has the right to claim that it bore the full bewildering, world-shrinking brunt of such a revolution, it is not us— it is our nineteenth-century forebears." The parallels for our own times are interesting, and instructive, as is the lesson in how a shift in perspective can change the emotional weight and shading we give to facts without actually changing any of the facts themselves. Also probably of interest to some genre fans, dealing as it does with perspectives of "deep time," giving us a series of pictures of what portions of our world were like millions of years ago, and how they got to be the way they are today, is Annals of the Former World (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), by John McPhee, an omnibus collection of McPhee's four earlier books on geology, rounded out by a new book about the

geology of the Great Plains. Most genre fans remain interested in space travel, of course, and so might be interested in a trade paperback reprint of A Man on the Moon (Penguin), by Andrew Chaikin, giving a behind-the-scenes look at the Apollo missions, or in Dragonfly, NASA and the Crisis aboard MIR (Harper Collins), by Bryan Burrough. Another object of interest to many genre fans is the dinosaur, which gets an interesting cultural examination in The Last Dinosaur Book by W. J. T. Mitchell (Univ. of Chicago Press). I can find no even remotely plausible genre-connection to justify mentioning one of my favorite nonfiction books this year, A Walk in the Woods (Broadway Books), by Bill Bryson, unless it's that this hilarious account of two middle-aged, pudgy, out-of-shape, unathletic men with no previous camping experience or outdoorsmanlike expertise trying to cope with the rigors of walking the Appalachian Trail may remind many of us of ourselves— except that Bryson is probably funnier telling about it all than we would be. *** There were a lot of genre movies out in 1998, including some box office blockbusters, some much-hyped immensely expensive films that "performed below expectations" (i.e., bombed out), some unmitigated stinkers, some movies that were actually pretty good, some that could have been better, and some movies where the thought that they were making a genre film probably never crossed the producers' minds in the first place. This could also be thought of as the Year of the Dueling Twin Movies, so that we had two Giant-Asteroids-Will-Slam-into-Earth-Unless-a-Desperate-Space-Mission-Can-Deflect-hem movies, two animated movies about cute talking bugs, two movies about "reality" actually being a show-business illusion, two big, glossy, gorgeously photographed After-Death Fantasy/angel movies, and so on. All of this, of course, is sheer coincidence, nothing more. (Cough.) The best genre movie I saw this year, and, agreeably, one of the box office champs as well, was The Truman Show. There are no surprises here for the experienced genre reader, of course— it's pretty much Philip K. Dick's Time Out of Joint crossed with D. G. Compton's The Unsleeping Eye, as far as content is concerned— but it's rare to see relatively sophisticated genre concepts translated to the screen with this degree of style, intelligence, and grace, with little or no talking down or prechewing of the material, a movie in which the director (a foreigner, of course) actually trusts his audience to be intelligent enough to understand it. This is certainly the most successful translation of Philip K. Dick-like material to the screen since a couple of inspired bits from 1974's Dark Star, and I think Dick would have liked it, even if he isn't credited anywhere here. Even Jim Carrey is surprisingly effective, with his patented mugging-and-leering routine slipping out only once or twice when the director's attention faltered. Visually, there are a couple of moments that are simply stunning: when the full moon suddenly turns into a searchlight, for instance, and begins sweeping over the town looking for the fugitive Carrey, or when Carrey's sailboat, supposedly taking him out over the open ocean, runs into the sky at the horizon, getting its mast stuck in it, or even the quieter moment when one of the stars falls from the sky, and proves to be a spotlight labeled "Polaris" (or whatever it was)— pure cognitive dissonance, of the sort that science fiction delivers best. Yes, I think Phil Dick would have liked this movie. (And to answer a question posed by TV Guide last year, "Would we actually watch The Truman Show?"— you bet your ass we would. That's the scariest thing about it.) Similar ground in some ways, although more openly satirical and Twilight Zone-ish, is covered in Pleasantville, an intelligent little comic nightmare about two '90s teens getting stuck in the black-and-white, white-bread, keep-smiling-no-matter-what world of a 1950s TV sitcom, a good little

movie unfairly overshadowed by the (mostly justified) attention given to The Truman Show. Next we turn to the two Giant-Rocks-Bash-the-Earth movies. One of these, the second one out of the gate, Armageddon, was immensely successful at the box office, perhaps the highest-grossing movie of the year; the other one, the more self-consciously "serious" Deep Impact, didn't do nearly as well. Although I wasn't— ha ha— blown away by either of these movies, both of which contain immensely embarrassing scientific howlers and huge holes in the plot-logic, I must say that my own reaction supports that of the box office. Deep Impact was weepy and New Agey, more of a soap opera than a disaster movie, with most of its special effects reserved for the very impressive— and frighteningly convincing— giant tsunami scenes at the end (one thing that annoyed me about this movie was that with days if not weeks of prior warning as to where the asteroid is going to hit, the government makes no effort to evacuate most of the population to higher ground, something that would have saved millions of lives, even if they had been forced to rough it in makeshift refugee camps in West Virginia; nor does the public react realistically, so you have scenes of crowds going about their business as usual in midtown Manhattan, strolling around as if nothing was happening, while the giant wave sweeps in on them). The special effects were worse in Armageddon, with the on-the-surface-of-the-"comet" scenes surprisingly poor, but the movie as a whole was considerably more vigorous and less self-important, loud, vulgar, fast-paced, full of MTV-style jump cuts and blaring rock music, with Bruce Willis doing an almost self-parodying turn as a crude, vulgar, cigar-chomping (but superhumanly competent) oil driller, supported by a cast of eccentric, crude, vulgar, two-fisted, hard-drinking, "colorful" roughnecks who might as well have stepped out of a Blackhawks or Sgt. Fury comic book. If Armageddon is junk— and it is— it's at least robust and entertaining junk, a relief after the slow, syrupy, self-congratulatory pretentiousness of Deep Impact. My least favorite scene in Deep Impact is where the estranged daughter gives up any last chance of survival so that she can share a sensitive, reconciling, New Age hug with her father on the beach as the giant tsunami sweeps down on them. The hard-bitten, tough and competent, ass-kicking Survivor Types of Armageddon would sneer at this— and rightly so. (You actually could have made a better movie out of Deep Impact by dropping the Earth-based story line altogether and instead concentrating exclusively on the space-mission story line, the best part of the film, mostly because of Robert Duvall's quiet, assured underplaying; less soap opera content that way, too.) Reaction was mixed to the other big-budget, special effects-heavy spectaculars of the year, the kind of movies that have to earn big in order to earn back at all. Star Trek: Insurrection seemed to do okay, although not spectacularly, at the box office, and audience reaction to it seemed similarly lukewarm, with nobody liking it as much as 1996's Star Trek: First Contact, and nobody loathing it as much as some of the franchise's low spots, such as the William Shatner-directed Star Trek V: The Final Frontier; most people seemed to agree that it was like an average episode of the TV show writ large, no better and no worse. Perhaps not the reaction that was hoped for, but it certainly keeps the option of another Star Trek movie alive; I'd be surprised if there wasn't one, at this point. Much the same thing— an episode of the TV show writ large— could be said of The X-Files movie, Fear the Future, which fared okay commercially. The immensely expensive Godzilla, on the other hand, one of the costliest movies ever made, was a major box-office disaster, a bomb of epic proportions— even the spin-off merchandising didn't sell; my local supermarket still has a half-dozen containers of Godzilla ice cream in the freezer. This failure was richly deserved; the movie was just awful, with few if any redeeming virtues. The redesigned monster, trumpeted in advance as a triumph of the CGI art, was surprisingly fake-looking (and faintly silly-looking, too), and not particularly scary; the monster from the original Godzilla film actually had more gravitas and presence, even though I knew even as a little kid that it was just a guy in a rubber suit. Lost in Space also seems to have "performed below expectations," although I don't think it was as major a bomb as Godzilla. Lost in Space actually had the best special effects and the most handsome and lavish set-dressing of any movie this year, and a good cast that it largely wasted— too bad they hadn't thought to put in a decent story and some good writing as well, while they were at it. The

decision to do Lost in Space straight rather than camp (although Gary Oldman doing a shameless Jonathan Harris imitation throughout for his interpretation of Doctor Smith is an eyebrow-raiser) was probably the initial mistake here; for a slambang action-adventure space spectacular, the movie has surprisingly little sense of fun, and is downright brooding at times, although with little of substance to actually brood about, for the most part. (I find it interesting, culturally, that the producers felt it necessary to load a lot of sodden stuff about '90s-style dysfunctional families, and a lot of New Age psychobabble, into even this brainless bit of fluff— it would have been a lot better off without it.) The movie ends with an obvious setup for a sequel, which, with luck, we'll never actually get. (I'm struck, in passing, with wonder and bemusement at the immense amounts of money Hollywood spent bringing a long-dead and not-terribly-important-in-the-first-place science fiction TV show back to fitful life, probably more money than has been spent on all of print science fiction in the last ten years. If you add in the immense budget for Godzilla, more than the Gross National Product of some small countries, the money spent on these two cinematic turkeys would comfortably support print science fiction publishing through a good hefty percentage of the coming century. Am I alone in thinking that this money could be better spent than it's being spent at present, for more worthwhile ends? Yes, I know that I am, pretty much, so don't bother to answer.) The Avengers sucked, completely lacking the mischievous flair and elan that made the original series such tongue-in-cheek wink-wink fun, and also bombed big at the box office; it was also perhaps the most critically savaged movie of the year, with almost nobody having anything good to say about it, a negative reaction so ubiquitous that one could imagine fans of the old TV show who hadn't agreed on anything else or even spoken in twenty years shaking hands and commiserating with each other about how awful it was. (The humiliating failure of movies such as Lost in Space and The Avengers won't keep the movie industry from visiting more big-budget resurrections of long-dead TV series on us, though, of course; several more are already on the way, in fact, including The Wild, Wild West, The Mod Squad, and even, heaven help us, Hogan's Heroes.) Dark City was a stylish and strikingly set-dressed exercise in future noir, although perhaps too obviously and heavily influenced by Bladerunner. Sphere wasted an even better cast than Lost in Space, including Dustin Hoffman and Samuel L. Jackson, in a movie that tried to be intellectually challenging, but somehow ended up rather muddled and emotionally flat instead. They'd have been better off, in my opinion, sticking with investigating the real-world consequences of the intriguing initial setup, a crashed spaceship found on the bottom of the ocean, rather than flying off into two-a-penny mysticism, where the special effects equivalent of a Magic Wishing Ball makes anything they dream about come true, thus enabling the director to devote the rest of the movie to investigating their fears in gooshy horror movie-style sequences where they're assailed by various monsters from the id of their own conjuring (how come only subconscious fears are made real by the Magic Wishing Ball?, I kept asking myself. How come none of them dreams that Sharon Stone has jumped into the sack with them, or that they found the puppy they lost when they were six, or that their brother isn't dead after all?). In the end, in spite of good intentions and some good efforts, Sphere is vaguely disappointing. (I haven't read the Michael Crichton novel from which this is taken, so I don't know how many of these tropes are drawn from the book, but the movie certainly tempts you to picture some executives sitting around somewhere and saying "Hey! Let's cross The Abyss with Event Horizon! That ought to sell!") A Bug's Life is the more successful and the more imaginative of the two talking bug movies (the best capsule description I've heard of it is Greg Feeley's remark that it was "Seven Samurai with ants"), and was a huge hit at the box office. The other one, Antz, is more obviously satirical (as might be expected from a movie in which Woody Allen voices the lead ant) and less adventurous and colorful, and didn't seem to have as much of an impact on the kids as A Bug's Life did (although both movies are full of

satiric humor that probably flies way over the heads of most of the target audience, A Bug's Life depends less on this element than Antz does). What Dreams May Come is a gorgeously photographed but not terribly involving after-death fantasy, also bungful of New Age philosophy and jargon, as is City of Angels, a stylish but rather bleak romance between a mortal woman and an angel who must decide whether to give up his immortality to be with her. A retake on the Cinderella story, Ever After is more sentimental and less obviously satirical than The Princess Bride, say, but also has its revisionist moments; this seemed to be something of a sleeper hit. I'm sure that the producers of Sliding Doors didn't think of themselves as making a genre film, but it's hard to think of this film in any other terms: it follows the experiences of a young woman in two parallel worlds, one in which she did catch a subway train and one in which she didn't, cutting back and forth between the two realities, and even coyly hinting at the end that the experiences from one reality can leak into and color the other. It's interesting that these concepts, once unquestionably science-fictional, are now so taken for granted and absorbed into the mainstream culture that people look at you in surprise when you suggest that Sliding Doors is a genre movie— although it is, by any fair standard, and a rather intelligent, quietly effective, and well-acted one, at that. (I'll bet nobody thinks to nominate it for this year's Hugo, though.) I could go on to make an argument that Shakespeare in Love appeals to the same audience that enjoys reading Alternate History stories, but trying to include it as a genre movie stretches the definition of an SF film beyond any useful limits, in my opinion, so I won't bother. I never managed to catch a small, independent film called Pi, which apparently deals with the Kabbalah and mathematical mysticism, but many of those who did were enthusiastic about it. Still on the horizon: everyone's waiting impatiently for the release of the new Star Wars movie, which will probably be the big story next year. Considering the wildly enthusiastic reaction even to the trailer for the movie, with audiences paying to get into theaters just to see the trailer, and then leaving before the actual film that was showing came on, it's probably not too risky a prediction to forecast immense commercial success for it. Whether it's artistically successful or not remains to be seen (although that trailer was pretty damn good, and made even cynics like myself look forward to seeing the film; some real expertise going on there, on the part of the trailer-makers). Frankly, I didn't pay a whole lot of attention to SF and fantasy on television this year. Several of the long-dominant genre shows have ended or are just about to end (or at least metamorphose), though, so obviously there will be some big changes next year. Babylon 5 concluded its initial five-year series this year, much to the dismay of the show's unbelievably dedicated fans, although there's a spin-off series in the works for next season. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is supposedly set to end this year too, which, if true, leaves the Star Trek empire with only the relatively unpopular (even with stone Star Trek fans) Star Trek: Voyager in place, the most attenuated that the Star Trek franchise has been in many years; it wouldn't surprise me if a new show were in the works there, too, although no official announcement of such has been made that I know of. Cult favorite The X-Files is also making noises about be nearing the end of its run, although speculation is rife as to whether the show will actually end or will just continue with a different cast; it seems a pretty good bet that Mulder and Scully will be leaving, though, whether the show continues or not. Highlander finally died, and was replaced by a spin-off show, Highlander: The Raven, featuring Amanda, one of the female Immortals from the old series, although in practice the show actually turns out to be more like La Femme Nikita than, as speculated, like Xena: Warrior Princess; it still fits well into the category of what I once called "Beautiful Women Kick Male Butt" shows, though. Leaving to one side those shows like Babylon 5 or Star Trek: Deep Space Nine or The X-Files that have ended or are supposedly ending, the most popular genre shows on television probably include Xena: Warrior Princess, Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, La Femme Nikita, Hercules: The Legendary

Journeys, and Third Rock From the Sun— not all of these could fairly be fitted into the subgenre of "Beautiful Women Kick Male Butt" shows (I suppose we could refer to "Hercules" as a "Guys with Blow-Dried Hair Kick Butt" show, but it doesn't have the same ring to it somehow), but, with the exception of Third Rock from the Sun, most of them seem to involve serious butt-kicking of one sort or another. Butt-kicking, then, is obviously the wave of the future for TV, especially when you consider nongenre shows such as Martial Law and Walker: Texas Ranger (to say nothing of the World Wrestling Federation, the Ultimate Fighting Challenge shows, and MTV'S Celebrity Deathmatch) that feature quite a bit of it. Maybe the Star Trek franchise should consider a "Star Trek Characters Kick Butt" show for its next series. Perhaps we could have WWF/Ultimate Fighting Challenge-style steel-cage deathmatch competitions between characters from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Babylon 5.... Minor new genre shows came and— in some cases— went throughout the year, but none of them so far seems to have made much of an impression on the viewing public. Mystery Science Theater 3000 just ended its long run, which is fine by me since I didn't find it very interesting for its last year anyway. Some of the critical buzz about last year's hot cult show, South Park, seems to have died away, perhaps because of overexposure— certainly you couldn't go into a gift shop last year without falling over a stack of South Park T-shirts, Kenny dolls, and Cartman key chains; they even put out boxes of Cheesy Poofs. The show is still intermittently funny, and still uses a lot of genre tropes, but it's beginning to grow repetitive, and I have a feeling its prime period of influence is already past. I still think that, for the most part, you'd be better off turning the set off and reading a book instead. *** The 56th World Science Fiction Convention, Bucconeer, was held in Baltimore, Maryland, from August 5 to 9, 1998, a month earlier than the traditional Labor Day date, and drew an estimated attendance of 5,474. The 1998 Hugo Awards, presented at Bucconeer, were: Best Novel, Forever Peace, by Joe Haldeman; Best Novella, " ... Where Angels Fear To Tread," by Allen Steele; Best Novelette, "We Will Drink a Fish Together ... ," by Bill Johnson; Best Short Story, "The 43 Antarean Dynasties," by Mike Resnick; Best Related Book, The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, edited by John Clute and John Grant; Best Professional Editor, Gardner Dozois; Best Professional Artist, Bob Eggleton; Best Dramatic Presentation, Contact; Best Semiprozine, Locus, edited by Charles N. Brown; Best Fanzine, Mimosa, edited by Nicki and Richard Lynch; Best Fan Writer, David Langford; Best Fan Artist, Joe Mayhew; plus the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer to Mary Doria Russell. The 1997 Nebula Awards, presented at a banquet at the Hotel Santa Fe in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on May 2, 1998, were: Best Novel, The Moon and the Sun, by Vonda N. McIntyre; Best Novella, "Abandon in Place," by Jerry Oltion; Best Novelette, "The Flowers of Aulit Prison," by Nancy Kress; Best Short Story, "Sister Emily's Lightship"; plus an Author Emeritus award to Nelson S. Bond and the Grand Master award to Poul Anderson. The World Fantasy Awards, presented at the Twenty-Fourth Annual World Fantasy Convention in Monterey, California, on November 1, 1998, were: Best Novel, The Physiognomy, by Jeffrey Ford; Best Novella, "Streetcar Dreams," by Richard Bowes; Best Short Fiction, "Dust Motes," by P. D. Cacek; Best Collection, The Throne of Bones, by Brian McNaughton; Best Anthology, Bending the Landscape: Fantasy, edited by Nicola Griffith and Stephen Pagel; Best Artist, Alan Lee; Special Award (Professional), to John Clute and John Grant, for The Encyclopedia of Fantasy; Special Award (Nonprofessional), to Fedogan & Bremer, for book publishing; plus a Life Achievement Award to

Edward L. Ferman and Andre Norton (tie). The 1998 Bram Stoker Awards, presented by the Horror Writers of America during a banquet at the New York Marriott East Side in New York City on June 6, 1998, were: Best Novel, Children of the Dusk, by Janet Berliner and George Guthridge; Best First Novel, Lives of the Monster Dogs, by Kirsten Bakis; Best Collection, Exorcisms and Ecstasies, by Karl Edward Wagner; Best Long Fiction, "The Big Blow," by Joe R. Lansdale; Best Short Story, "Rat Food," by Edo van Belkom and David Nickle; Nonfiction, Dark Thoughts: On Writing, by Stanley Wiater; a Specialty Press Award to Richard Chizmar of Cemetery Dance Publications; and the Hammer Award to Sheldon Jaffery, plus a Life Achievement Award to Jack Williamson and William Peter Blatty. The 1997 John W. Campbell Memorial Award was won by Forever Peace, by Joe Haldeman. The 1997 Theodore Sturgeon Award for Best Short Story was won by "House of Dreams," by Michael F. Flynn. The 1997 Philip K. Dick Memorial Award went to The Troika, by Stepan Chapman, with a Special Citation to Acts of Conscience, by William Barton. The 1997 Arthur C. Clarke award was won by The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell. The 1997 James Tiptree, Jr., Memorial Award was won by Black Wine, by Candas Jane Dorsey and "Travels with the Snow Queen," by Kelly Link (tie). *** Dead in 1998 or early 1999 were: Jerome Bixby, 75, prolific short-story writer and screenwriter, author of the collection Space by the Tale, whose best-known story "It's a Good Life" was made into one of the most famous Twilight Zone episodes ever; Robert A. W. ("Doc") Lowndes 81, veteran SF editor, writer, and member of the Futurians (the famous New York City fan group whose other members included Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, Donald Wollheim, and other notables), one-time editor of magazines such as Future Fiction, Original Science Fiction Stories, and Startling Mystery Stories; Paul Lehr, 68, acclaimed SF artist, at one time among the most celebrated and widely used cover artists in the SF publishing world; Naomi Mitchison, 101, writer, socialist, "freethinker," and prominent feminist, probably best known to the genre for her historical fantasy The Corn King and the Spring Queen, also the author of books such as Solution Three, Not by Bread Alone, and Memoirs of a Spacewoman; Rachel Cosgrove Payes, 75, veteran writer, author of Bridge to Yesterday; John W. Pritchard, 85, who wrote SF as "Ian Wallace," author of novels such as Croyd, The Rape of the Sun, and Pan Sagittarius; T. A. Waters, 60, writer, actor, and stage magician, author of the SF novel The Probability Pad; Jo Clayton, 58, SF/fantasy writer, author of thirty-five books, including Diadem from the Stars and Moongather; Bob Kane, 83, comic-book artist, famous as the creator of Batman; Jean-Claude Forest, 68, French writer and artist, best known as the creator of the comic strip Barbarella, which was later adapted into a well-known SF movie; Eric Ambler, 89, best known for his spy novels such as The Mask of Dimitrios, author of the associational SF thriller The Dark Frontier; Allen Drury, 80, political novelist best known for Advise and Consent, also author of the near-future SF novel The Throne of Saturn; Lawrence Sanders, 78, thriller writer, best known for The First Deadly Sin and The Anderson Tapes, whose books included borderline SF novels The Sixth Commandment and The Tomorrow File; Brian Moore, 77, noted literary novelist best known to the

genre audience for the screenplay for the near-future TV movie Catholics; Alain Doremieux, 64, leading French writer, editor, and translator; Shin'ichi Hoshi, 71, Japanese SF writer; Henrik Altov, 52, leading Russian SF writer; Sean A. Moore, 33, fantasy novelist and game designer; Robert Marasco, 62, playwright and novelist, author of the horror novel Burnt Offerings; Ernst Junger, 102, German writer; Peter Nilson, 60, Swedish astronomer and author; Jose Paulo Paes, 72, Brazilian critic, editor, and translator; Wayland Drew, 66, author of film novelizations and the SF trilogy "The Erthring Cycle"; Miichael D. Weaver, 36, SF/fantasy writer, author of Mercedes Nights and other novels; Ted Hughes, 68, Britain's Poet Laureate, author of occasional SF poetry, as well as two Young Adult SF novels The Iron Man and The Iron Woman; Ian Gunn, 40, Australian fan artist and writer, winner of nine Ditmar Awards; Frank D. McSherry, Jr., 69, coeditor (with Martin H. Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh) of more than thirty SF and fantasy anthologies; Alan D. Williams, 72, noted New York book editor, the editor on many of Stephen King's most famous novels; Archie Goodwin, 60, leading comic-book editor; Lee Elias, 77, comics artist who drew the Jack Williamson-scripted comic strip Beyond Mars; John L. Millard, 80, longtime Canadian fan, chairman of the 1973 World Science Fiction Convention, Torcon; Aubery Vincent Clarke, 76, longtime British fan; John V. Baltadonis, longtime Philadelphia-area fan, one of the founding members of the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society; T. Bruce Yerke, 75, longtime fan; Richard Wright, 55, longtime fan; Ardis Waters, 56, fan and writer, sister of writer Melisa Michaels; and Margaret Brady Martin, 80, mother of SF writer George R. R. Martin. Oceanic GREG EGAN As the new century approaches, it's become obvious that Australian writer Greg Egan is one of the Big Names to emerge in SF in the nineties, probably the best new "hard-science" writer to enter the field since Greg Bear, and already one of the most widely known of all Australian genre writers. In the last few years, he has become a frequent contributor to Interzone and Asimov's Science Fiction, and has made sales as well to Pulphouse, Analog, Aurealis, Eidolon, and elsewhere; many of his stories have also appeared in various Best of the Year series, and he was on the Hugo final ballot in 1995 for his story "Cocoon," which won the Ditmar Award and the Asimov's Readers Award. His first novel, Quarantine, appeared in 1992 to wide critical acclaim, and was followed by a second novel in 1994, Permutation City, which won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. His most recent books are two new novels, Distress and Diaspora, and three collections of his short fiction, Axiomatic, Luminous, and Our Lady of Chernobyl. Upcoming is a new novel, Teranesia. He has had stories in our Seventh, Eighth, Ninth, Tenth, Eleventh, Twelfth, Thirteenth, and Fifteenth Annual Collections. He has a Web site at http://www.netspace.net.au/~gregegan/. Here he takes us into the far future and across the galaxy for a powerful, evocative, and compelling study of a young boy's coming-of-age, as that boy struggles to understand the world and his place in it and grapples with controversial and perhaps potentially deadly issues of faith and acceptance and God's Plan For The World, as well as diving deep into a literal ocean of mystery in search of answers to the kinds of questions it has always been dangerous to ask, in any age and on any world.... ONE The swell was gently lifting and lowering the boat. My breathing grew slower, falling into step with the

creaking of the hull, until I could no longer tell the difference between the faint rhythmic motion of the cabin and the sensation of filling and emptying my lungs. It was like floating in darkness: every inhalation buoyed me up, slightly; every exhalation made me sink back down again. In the bunk above me, my brother Daniel said distinctly, "Do you believe in God?" My head was cleared of sleep in an instant, but I didn't reply straight away. I'd never closed my eyes, but the darkness of the unlit cabin seemed to shift in front of me, grains of phantom light moving like a cloud of disturbed insects. "Martin?" "I'm awake." "Do you believe in God?" "Of course." Everyone I knew believed in God. Everyone talked about Her, everyone prayed to Her. Daniel most of all. Since he'd joined the Deep Church the previous summer, he prayed every morning for a kilotau before dawn. I'd often wake to find myself aware of him kneeling by the far wall of the cabin, muttering and pounding his chest, before I drifted gratefully back to sleep. Our family had always been Transitional, but Daniel was fifteen, old enough to choose for himself. My mother accepted this with diplomatic silence, but my father seemed positively proud of Daniel's independence and strength of conviction. My own feelings were mixed. I'd grown used to swimming in my older brother's wake, but I'd never resented it, because he'd always let me in on the view ahead: reading me passages from the books he read himself, teaching me words and phrases from the languages he studied, sketching some of the mathematics I was yet to encounter first-hand. We used to lie awake half the night, talking about the cores of stars or the hierarchy of transfinite numbers. But Daniel had told me nothing about the reasons for his conversion, and his ever increasing piety. I didn't know whether to feel hurt by this exclusion, or simply grateful; I could see that being Transitional was like a pale imitation of being Deep Church, but I wasn't sure that this was such a bad thing if the wages of mediocrity included sleeping until sunrise. Daniel said, "Why?" I stared up at the underside of his bunk, unsure whether I was really seeing it or just imagining its solidity against the cabin's ordinary darkness. "Someone must have guided the Angels here from Earth. If Earth's too far away to see from Covenant ... how could anyone find Covenant from Earth, without God's help?" I heard Daniel shift slightly. "Maybe the Angels had better telescopes than us. Or maybe they spread out from Earth in all directions, launching thousands of expeditions without even knowing what they'd find." I laughed. "But they had to come here, to be made flesh again!" Even a less-than-devout ten-year-old knew that much. God prepared Covenant as the place for the Angels to repent their theft of immortality. The Transitionals believed that in a million years we could earn the right to be Angels again; the Deep Church believed that we'd remain flesh until the stars fell from the sky. Daniel said, "What makes you so sure that there were ever really Angels? Or that God really sent them Her daughter, Beatrice, to lead them back into the flesh?"

I pondered this for a while. The only answers I could think of came straight out of the Scriptures, and Daniel had taught me years ago that appeals to authority counted for nothing. Finally, I had to confess: "I don't know." I felt foolish, but I was grateful that he was willing to discuss these difficult questions with me. I wanted to believe in God for the right reasons, not just because everyone around me did. He said, "Archaeologists have shown that we must have arrived about twenty thousand years ago. Before that, there's no evidence of humans, or any coecological plants and animals. That makes the Crossing older than the Scriptures say, but there are some dates that are open to interpretation, and with a bit of poetic license everything can be made to add up. And most biologists think the native microfauna could have formed by itself over millions of years, starting from simple chemicals, but that doesn't mean God didn't guide the whole process. Everything's compatible, really. Science and the Scriptures can both be true." I thought I knew where he was headed, now. "So you've worked out a way to use science to prove that God exists?" I felt a surge of pride; my brother was a genius! "No." Daniel was silent for a moment. "The thing is, it works both ways. Whatever's written in the Scriptures, people can always come up with different explanations for the facts. The ships might have left Earth for some other reason. The Angels might have made bodies for themselves for some other reason. There's no way to convince a non-believer that the Scriptures are the word of God. It's all a matter of faith." "Oh." "Faith's the most important thing," Daniel insisted. "If you don't have faith, you can be tempted into believing anything at all." I made a noise of assent, trying not to sound too disappointed. I'd expected more from Daniel than the kind of bland assertions that sent me dozing off during sermons at the Transitional church. "Do you know what you have to do to get faith?" "No." "Ask for it. That's all. Ask Beatrice to come into your heart and grant you the gift of faith." I protested, "We do that every time we go to church!" I couldn't believe he'd forgotten the Transitional service already. After the priest placed a drop of seawater on our tongues, to symbolize the blood of Beatrice, we asked for the gifts of faith, hope, and love. "But have you received it?" I'd never thought about that. "I'm not sure." I believed in God, didn't I? "I might have." Daniel was amused. "If you had the gift of faith, you'd know." I gazed up into the darkness, troubled. "Do you have to go to the Deep Church, to ask for it properly?" "No. Even in the Deep Church, not everyone has invited Beatrice into their hearts. You have to do it the way it says in the Scriptures: 'like an unborn child again, naked and helpless.' "

"I was Immersed, wasn't I?" "In a metal bowl, when you were thirty days old. Infant Immersion is a gesture by the parents, an affirmation of their own good intentions. But it's not enough to save the child." I was feeling very disoriented now. My father, at least, approved of Daniel's conversion ... but now Daniel was trying to tell me that our family's transactions with God had all been grossly deficient, if not actually counterfeit. Daniel said, "Remember what Beatrice told Her followers, the last time She appeared? 'Unless you are willing to drown in My blood, you will never look upon the face of My Mother.' So they bound each other hand and foot, and weighted themselves down with rocks." My chest tightened. "And you've done that?" "Yes." "When?" "Almost a year ago." I was more confused than ever. "Did Ma and Fa go?" Daniel laughed. "No! It's not a public ceremony. Some friends of mine from the Prayer Group helped; someone has to be on deck to haul you up, because it would be arrogant to expect Beatrice to break your bonds and raise you to the surface, like She did with Her followers. But in the water, you're alone with God." He climbed down from his bunk and crouched by the side of my bed. "Are you ready to give your life to Beatrice, Martin?" His voice sent gray sparks flowing through the darkness. I hesitated. "What if I just dive in? And stay under for a while?" I'd been swimming off the boat at night plenty of times, there was nothing to fear from that. "No. You have to be weighted down." His tone made it clear that there could be no compromise on this. "How long can you hold your breath?" "Two hundred tau." That was an exaggeration; two hundred was what I was aiming for. "That's long enough." I didn't reply. Daniel said, "I'll pray with you." I climbed out of bed, and we knelt together. Daniel murmured, "Please, Holy Beatrice, grant my brother Martin the courage to accept the precious gift of Your blood." Then he started praying in what I took to be a foreign language, uttering a rapid stream of harsh syllables unlike anything I'd heard before. I listened apprehensively; I wasn't sure that I wanted Beatrice to change my mind, and I was afraid that this display of fervor might actually persuade Her.

I said, "What if I don't do it?" "Then you'll never see the face of God." I knew what that meant: I'd wander alone in the belly of Death, in darkness, for eternity. And even if the Scriptures weren't meant to be taken literally on this, the reality behind the metaphor could only be worse. Indescribably worse. "But ... what about Ma and Fa?" I was more worried about them, because I knew they'd never climb weighted off the side of the boat at Daniel's behest. "That will take time," he said softly. My mind reeled. He was absolutely serious. I heard him stand and walk over to the ladder. He climbed a few rungs and opened the hatch. Enough starlight came in to give shape to his arms and shoulders, but as he turned to me I still couldn't make out his face. "Come on, Martin!" he whispered. "The longer you put it off, the harder it gets." The hushed urgency of his voice was familiar: generous and conspiratorial, nothing like an adult's impatience. He might almost have been daring me to join him in a midnight raid on the pantry— not because he really needed a collaborator, but because he honestly didn't want me to miss out on the excitement, or the spoils. I suppose I was more afraid of damnation than drowning, and I'd always trusted Daniel to warn me of the dangers ahead. But this time I wasn't entirely convinced that he was right, so I must have been driven by something more than fear, and blind trust. Maybe it came down to the fact that he was offering to make me his equal in this. I was ten years old, and I ached to become something more than I was; to reach, not my parents' burdensome adulthood, but the halfway point, full of freedom and secrets, that Daniel had reached. I wanted to be as strong, as fast, as quick-witted and widely read as he was. Becoming as certain of God would not have been my first choice, but there wasn't much point hoping for divine intervention to grant me anything else. I followed him up onto the deck. He took cord, and a knife, and four spare weights of the kind we used on our nets from the toolbox. He threaded the weights onto the cord, then I took off my shorts and sat naked on the deck while he knotted a figure-eight around my ankles. I raised my feet experimentally; the weights didn't seem all that heavy. But in the water, I knew, they'd be more than enough to counteract my body's slight buoyancy. "Martin? Hold out your hands." Suddenly I was crying. With my arms free, at least I could swim against the tug of the weights. But if my hands were tied, I'd be helpless. Daniel crouched down and met my eyes. "Ssh. It's all right." I hated myself. I could feel my face contorted into the mask of a blubbering infant. "Are you afraid?"

I nodded. Daniel smiled reassuringly. "You know why? You know who's doing that? Death doesn't want Beatrice to have you. He wants you for himself. So he's here on this boat, putting fear into your heart, because he knows he's almost lost you." I saw something move in the shadows behind the toolbox, something slithering into the darkness. If we went back down to the cabin now, would Death follow us? To wait for Daniel to fall asleep? If I'd turned my back on Beatrice, who could I ask to send Death away? I stared at the deck, tears of shame dripping from my cheeks. I held out my arms, wrists together. When my hands were tied— not palm-to-palm as I'd expected, but in separate loops joined by a short bridge— Daniel unwound a long stretch of rope from the winch at the rear of the boat, and coiled it on the deck. I didn't want to think about how long it was, but I knew I'd never dived to that depth. He took the blunt hook at the end of the rope, slipped it over my arms, then screwed it closed to form an unbroken ring. Then he checked again that the cord around my wrists was neither so tight as to burn me, nor so loose as to let me slip. As he did this, I saw something creep over his face: some kind of doubt or fear of his own. He said, "Hang on to the hook. Just in case. Don't let go, no matter what. Okay??" He whispered something to Beatrice, then looked up at me, confident again. He helped me to stand and shuffle over to the guard rail, just to one side of the winch. Then he picked me up under the arms and lifted me over, resting my feet on the outer hull. The deck was inert, a mineralized endoshell, but behind the guard rails the hull was palpably alive: slick with protective secretions, glowing softly. My toes curled uselessly against the lubricated skin; I had no purchase at all. The hull was supporting some of my weight, but Daniel's arms would tire eventually. If I wanted to back out, I'd have to do it quickly. A warm breeze was blowing. I looked around, at the flat horizon, at the blaze of stars, at the faint silver light off the water. Daniel recited: "Holy Beatrice, I am ready to die to this world. Let me drown in Your blood, that I might be redeemed, and look upon the face of Your Mother." I repeated the words, trying hard to mean them. "Holy Beatrice, I offer You my life. All I do now, I do for You. Come into my heart, and grant me the gift of faith. Come into my heart, and grant me the gift of hope. Come into my heart, and grant me the gift of love." "And grant me the gift of love." Daniel released me. At first, my feet seemed to adhere magically to the hull, and I pivoted backward without actually falling. I clung tightly to the hook, pressing the cold metal against my belly, and willed the rope of the winch to snap taut, leaving me dangling in midair. I even braced myself for the shock. Some part of me really did believe that I could change my mind, even now. Then my feet slipped and I plunged into the ocean and sank straight down. It was not like a dive— not even a dive from an untried height, when it took so long for the water to bring you to a halt that it began to grow frightening. I was falling through the water ever faster, as if it was air.

The vision I'd had of the rope keeping me above the water now swung to the opposite extreme: my acceleration seemed to prove that the coil on the deck was attached to nothing, that its frayed end was already beneath the surface. That's what the followers had done, wasn't it? They'd let themselves be thrown in without a lifeline. So Daniel had cut the rope, and I was on my way to the bottom of the ocean. Then the hook jerked my hands up over my head, jarring my wrists and shoulders, and I was motionless. I turned my face toward the surface, but neither starlight nor the hull's faint phosphorescence reached this deep. I let a stream of bubbles escape from my mouth; I felt them slide over my upper lip, but no trace of them registered in the darkness. I shifted my hands warily over the hook. I could still feel the cord fast around my wrists, but Daniel had warned me not to trust it. I brought my knees up to my chest, gauging the effect of the weights. If the cord broke, at least my hands would be free, but even so I wasn't sure I'd be able to ascend. The thought of trying to unpick the knots around my ankles as I tumbled deeper filled me with horror. My shoulders ached, but I wasn't injured. It didn't take much effort to pull myself up until my chin was level with the bottom of the hook. Going further was awkward— with my hands so close together I couldn't brace myself properly— but on the third attempt I managed to get my arms locked, pointing straight down. I'd done this without any real plan, but then it struck me that even with my hands and feet tied, I could try shinning up the rope. It was just a matter of getting started. I'd have to turn upside-down, grab the rope between my knees, then curl up— dragging the hook— and get a grip with my hands at a higher point. And if I couldn't reach up far enough to right myself? I'd ascend feet-first. I couldn't even manage the first step. I thought it would be as simple as keeping my arms rigid and letting myself topple backward, but in the water even two-thirds of my body wasn't sufficient to counterbalance the weights. I tried a different approach: I dropped down to hang at arm's length, raised my legs as high as I could, then proceeded to pull myself up again. But my grip wasn't tight enough to resist the turning force of the weights; I just pivoted around my center of gravity— which was somewhere near my knees— and ended up, still bent double, but almost horizontal. I eased myself down again, and tried threading my feet through the circle of my arms. I didn't succeed on the first attempt, and then on reflection it seemed like a bad move anyway. Even if I managed to grip the rope between my bound feet— rather than just tumbling over backward, out of control, and dislocating my shoulders— climbing the rope upside-down with my hands behind my back would either be impossible, or so awkward and strenuous that I'd run out of oxygen before I got a tenth of the way. I let some more air escape from my lungs. I could feel the muscles in my diaphragm reproaching me for keeping them from doing what they wanted to do; not urgently yet, but the knowledge that I had no control over when I'd be able to draw breath again made it harder to stay calm. I knew I could rely on Daniel to bring me to the surface on the count of two hundred. But I'd only ever stayed down for a hundred and sixty. Forty more tau would be an eternity.

I'd almost forgotten what the whole ordeal was meant to be about, but now I started praying. Please Holy Beatrice, don't let me die. I know You drowned like this to save me, but if I die it won't help anyone. Daniel would end up in the deepest shit ... but that's not a threat, it's just an observation. I felt a stab of anxiety; on top of everything else, had I just offended the Daughter of God? I struggled on, my confidence waning. I don't want to die. But You already know that. So I don't know what You want me to say. I released some more stale air, wishing I'd counted the time I'd been under: you weren't supposed to empty your lungs too quickly— when they were deflated it was even harder not to take a breath— but holding all the carbon dioxide in too long wasn't good either. Praying only seemed to make me more desperate, so I tried to think other kinds of holy thoughts. I couldn't remember anything from the Scriptures word for word, but the gist of the most important part started running through my mind. After living in Her body for thirty years, and persuading all the Angels to become mortal again, Beatrice had gone back up to their deserted spaceship and flown it straight into the ocean. When Death saw Her coming, he took the form of a giant serpent, coiled in the water, waiting. And even though She was the Daughter of God, with the power to do anything, She let Death swallow Her. That's how much She loved us. Death thought he'd won everything. Beatrice was trapped inside him, in the darkness, alone. The Angels were flesh again, so he wouldn't even have to wait for the stars to fall before he claimed them. But Beatrice was part of God. Death had swallowed part of God. This was a mistake. After three days, his jaws burst open and Beatrice came flying out, wreathed in fire. Death was broken, shriveled, diminished. My limbs were numb but my chest was burning. Death was still strong enough to hold down the damned. I started thrashing about blindly, wasting whatever oxygen was left in my blood, but desperate to distract myself from the urge to inhale. Please Holy Beatrice— Please Daniel— Luminous bruises blossomed behind my eyes and drifted out into the water. I watched them curling into a kind of vortex, as if something was drawing them in. It was the mouth of the serpent, swallowing my soul. I opened my own mouth and made a wretched noise, and Death swam forward to kiss me, to breathe cold water into my lungs. Suddenly, everything was seared with light. The serpent turned and fled, like a pale timid worm. A wave of contentment washed over me, as if I was an infant again and my mother had wrapped her arms around me tightly. It was like basking in sunlight, listening to laughter, dreaming of music too beautiful to be real. Every muscle in my body was still trying to prize my lungs open to the water, but now I found myself fighting this almost absentmindedly while I marveled at my strange euphoria.

Cold air swept over my hands and down my arms. I raised myself up to take a mouthful, then slumped down again, giddy and spluttering, grateful for every breath but still elated by something else entirely. The light that had filled my eyes was gone, but it left a violet afterimage everywhere I looked. Daniel kept winding until my head was level with the guard rail, then he clamped the winch, bent down, and threw me over his shoulder. I'd been warm enough in the water, but now my teeth were chattering. Daniel wrapped a towel around me, then set to work cutting the cord. I beamed at him. "I'm so happy!" He gestured to me to be quieter, but then he whispered joyfully, "That's the love of Beatrice. She'll always be with you now, Martin." I blinked with surprise, then laughed softly at my own stupidity. Until that moment, I hadn't connected what had happened with Beatrice at all. But of course it was Her. I'd asked Her to come into my heart, and She had. And I could see it in Daniel's face: a year after his own Drowning, he still felt Her presence. He said, "Everything you do now is for Beatrice. When you look through your telescope, you'll do it to honor Her creation. When you eat, or drink, or swim, you'll do it to give thanks for Her gifts." I nodded enthusiastically. Daniel tidied everything away, even soaking up the puddles of water I'd left on the deck. Back in the cabin, he recited from the Scriptures, passages that I'd never really understood before, but which now all seemed to be about the Drowning, and the way I was feeling. It was as if I'd opened the book and found myself mentioned by name on every page. When Daniel fell asleep before me, for the first time in my life I didn't feel the slightest pang of loneliness. The Daughter of God was with me: I could feel Her presence, like a flame inside my skull, radiating warmth through the darkness behind my eyes. Giving me comfort, giving me strength. Giving me faith. TWO The monastery was almost four milliradians northeast of our home grounds. Daniel and I took the launch to a rendezvous point, and met up with three other small vessels before continuing. It had been the same routine every tenth night for almost a year— and Daniel had been going to the Prayer Group himself for a year before that— so the launch didn't need much supervision. Feeding on nutrients in the ocean, propelling itself by pumping water through fine channels in its skin, guided by both sunlight and Covenant's magnetic field, it was a perfect example of the kind of legacy of the Angels that technology would never be able to match. Bartholomew, Rachel, and Agnes were in one launch, and they traveled beside us while the others skimmed ahead. Bartholomew and Rachel were married, though they were only seventeen, scarcely older than Daniel. Agnes, Rachel's sister, was sixteen. Because I was the youngest member of the Prayer Group, Agnes had fussed over me from the day I'd joined. She said, "It's your big night tonight, Martin, isn't it?" I nodded, but declined to pursue the conversation, leaving her free to talk to Daniel.

It was dusk by the time the monastery came into sight, a conical tower built from at least ten thousand hulls, rising up from the water in the stylized form of Beatrice's spaceship. Aimed at the sky, not down into the depths. Though some commentators on the Scriptures insisted that the spaceship itself had sunk forever, and Beatrice had risen from the water unaided, it was still the definitive symbol of Her victory over Death. For the three days of Her separation from God, all such buildings stood in darkness, but that was half a year away, and now the monastery shone from every porthole. There was a narrow tunnel leading into the base of the tower; the launches detected its scent in the water and filed in one by one. I knew they didn't have souls, but I wondered what it would have been like for them if they'd been aware of their actions. Normally they rested in the dock of a single hull, a pouch of boatskin that secured them but still left them largely exposed. Maybe being drawn instinctively into this vast structure would have felt even safer, even more comforting, than docking with their home boat. When I said something to this effect, Rachel, in the launch behind me, sniggered. Agnes said, "Don't be horrible." The walls of the tunnel phosphoresced pale green, but the opening ahead was filled with white lamplight, dazzlingly richer and brighter. We emerged into a canal circling a vast atrium, and continued around it until the launches found empty docks. As we disembarked, every footstep, every splash, echoed back at us. I looked up at the ceiling, a dome spliced together from hundreds of curved triangular hull sections, tattooed with scenes from the Scriptures. The original illustrations were more than a thousand years old, but the living boatskin degraded the pigments on a time scale of decades, so the monks had to constantly renew them. "Beatrice Joining the Angels" was my favorite. Because the Angels weren't flesh, they didn't grow inside their mothers; they just appeared from nowhere in the streets of the Immaterial Cities. In the picture on the ceiling, Beatrice's immaterial body was half-formed, with cherubs still working to clothe the immaterial bones of Her legs and arms in immaterial muscles, veins, and skin. A few Angels in luminous robes were glancing sideways at Her, but you could tell they weren't particularly impressed. They'd had no way of knowing, then, who She was. A corridor with its own smaller illustrations led from the atrium to the meeting room. There were about fifty people in the Prayer Group— including several priests and monks, though they acted just like everyone else. In church, you followed the liturgy; the priest slotted in his or her sermon, but there was no room for the worshippers to do much more than pray or sing in unison and offer rote responses. Here it was much less formal. There were two or three different speakers every night— sometimes guests who were visiting the monastery, sometimes members of the group— and after that anyone could ask the group to pray with them, about whatever they liked. I'd fallen behind the others, but they'd saved me an aisle seat. Agnes was to my left, then Daniel, Bartholomew and Rachel. Agnes said, "Are you nervous?" "No." Daniel laughed, as if this claim was ridiculous. I said, "I'm not." I'd meant to sound loftily unperturbed, but the words came out sullen and childish. The first two speakers were both lay theologians, Firmlanders who were visiting the monastery. One

gave a talk about people who belonged to false religions, and how they were all— in effect— worshipping Beatrice, but just didn't know it. He said they wouldn't be damned, because they'd had no choice about the cultures they were born into. Beatrice would know they'd meant well, and forgive them. I wanted this to be true, but it made no sense to me. Either Beatrice was the Daughter of God, and everyone who thought otherwise had turned away from Her into the darkness, or ... there was no "or." I only had to close my eyes and feel Her presence to know that. Still, everyone applauded when the man finished, and all the questions people asked seemed sympathetic to his views, so perhaps his arguments had simply been too subtle for me to follow. The second speaker referred to Beatrice as "the Holy Jester," and rebuked us severely for not paying enough attention to Her sense of humor. She cited events in the Scriptures which she said were practical jokes, and then went on at some length about "the healing power of laughter." It was all about as gripping as a lecture on nutrition and hygiene; I struggled to keep my eyes open. At the end, no one could think of any questions. Then Carol, who was running the meeting, said, "Now Martin is going to give witness to the power of Beatrice in his life." Everyone applauded encouragingly. As I rose to my feet and stepped into the aisle, Daniel leaned toward Agnes and whispered sarcastically, "This should be good." I stood at the lectern and gave the talk I'd been rehearsing for days. Beatrice, I said, was beside me now whatever I did: whether I studied or worked, ate or swam, or just sat and watched the stars. When I woke in the morning and looked into my heart, She was there without fail, offering me strength and guidance. When I lay in bed at night, I feared nothing, because I knew She was watching over me. Before my Drowning, I'd been unsure of my faith, but now I'd never again be able to doubt that the Daughter of God had become flesh, and died, and conquered Death, because of Her great love for us. It was all true, but even as I said these things I couldn't get Daniel's sarcastic words out of my mind. I glanced over at the row where I'd been sitting, at the people I'd traveled with. What did I have in common with them, really? Rachel and Bartholomew were married. Bartholomew and Daniel had studied together, and still played on the same dive-ball team. Daniel and Agnes were probably in love. And Daniel was my brother ... but the only difference that seemed to make was the fact that he could belittle me far more efficiently than any stranger. In the open prayer that followed, I paid no attention to the problems and blessings people were sharing with the group. I tried silently calling on Beatrice to dissolve the knot of anger in my heart. But I couldn't do it; I'd turned too far away from Her. When the meeting was over, and people started moving into the adjoining room to talk for a while, I hung back. When the others were out of sight, I ducked into the corridor, and headed straight for the launch. Daniel could get a ride home with his friends; it wasn't far out of their way. I'd wait a short distance from the boat until he caught up; if my parents saw me arrive on my own I'd be in trouble. Daniel would be angry, of course, but he wouldn't betray me. Once I'd freed the launch from its dock, it knew exactly where to go: around the canal, back to the tunnel, out into the open sea. As I sped across the calm, dark water, I felt the presence of Beatrice returning, which seemed like a sign that She understood that I'd had to get away.

I leaned over and dipped my hand in the water, feeling the current the launch was generating by shuffling ions in and out of the cells of its skin. The outer hull glowed a phosphorescent blue, more to warn other vessels than to light the way. In the time of Beatrice, one of her followers had sat in the Immaterial City and designed this creature from scratch. It gave me a kind of vertigo, just imagining the things the Angels had known. I wasn't sure why so much of it had been lost, but I wanted to rediscover it all. Even the Deep Church taught that there was nothing wrong with that, so long as we didn't use it to try to become immortal again. The monastery shrank to a blur of light on the horizon, and there was no other beacon visible on the water, but I could read the stars, and sense the field lines, so I knew the launch was heading in the right direction. When I noticed a blue speck in the distance, it was clear that it wasn't Daniel and the others chasing after me; it was coming from the wrong direction. As I watched the launch drawing nearer I grew anxious; if this was someone I knew, and I couldn't come up with a good reason to be traveling alone, word would get back to my parents. Before I could make out anyone on board, a voice shouted, "Can you help me? I'm lost!" I thought for a while before replying. The voice sounded almost matter-of-fact, making light of this blunt admission of helplessness, but it was no joke. If you were sick, your diurnal sense and your field sense could both become scrambled, making the stars much harder to read. It had happened to me a couple of times, and it had been a horrible experience— even standing safely on the deck of our boat. This late at night, a launch with only its field sense to guide it could lose track of its position, especially if you were trying to take it somewhere it hadn't been before. I shouted back our coordinates, and the time. I was fairly confident that I had them down to the nearest hundred microradians, and few hundred tau. "That can't be right! Can I approach? Let our launches talk?" I hesitated. It had been drummed into me for as long as I could remember that if I ever found myself alone on the water, I should give other vessels a wide berth unless I knew the people on board. But Beatrice was with me, and if someone needed help it was wrong to refuse them. "All right!" I stopped dead, and waited for the stranger to close the gap. As the launch drew up beside me, I was surprised to see that the passenger was a young man. He looked about Bartholomew's age, but he'd sounded much older. We didn't need to tell the launches what to do; proximity was enough to trigger a chemical exchange of information. The man said, "Out on your own?" "I'm traveling with my brother and his friends. I just went ahead a bit." That made him smile. "Sent you on your way, did they? What do you think they're getting up to, back there?" I didn't reply; that was no way to talk about people you didn't even know. The man scanned the horizon, then spread his arms in a gesture of sympathy. "You must be feeling left out." I shook my head. There was a pair of binoculars on the floor behind him; even before he'd called out for

help, he could have seen that I was alone. He jumped deftly between the launches, landing on the stern bench. I said, "There's nothing to steal." My skin was crawling, more with disbelief than fear. He was standing on the bench in the starlight, pulling a knife from his belt. The details— the pattern carved into the handle, the serrated edge of the blade— only made it seem more like a dream. He coughed, suddenly nervous. "Just do what I tell you, and you won't get hurt." I filled my lungs and shouted for help with all the strength I had; I knew there was no one in earshot, but I thought it might still frighten him off. He looked around, more startled than angry, as if he couldn't quite believe I'd waste so much effort. I jumped backward, into the water. A moment later I heard him follow me. I found the blue glow of the launches above me, then swam hard, down and away from them, without wasting time searching for his shadow. Blood was pounding in my ears, but I knew I was moving almost silently; however fast he was, in the darkness he could swim right past me without knowing it. If he didn't catch me soon he'd probably return to the launch and wait to spot me when I came up for air. I had to surface far enough away to be invisible— even with the binoculars. I was terrified that I'd feel a hand close around my ankle at any moment, but Beatrice was with me. As I swam, I thought back to my Drowning, and Her presence grew stronger than ever. When my lungs were almost bursting, She helped me to keep going, my limbs moving mechanically, blotches of light floating in front of my eyes. When I finally knew I had to surface, I turned face-up and ascended slowly, then lay on my back with only my mouth and nose above the water, refusing the temptation to stick my head up and look around. I filled and emptied my lungs a few times, then dived again. The fifth time I surfaced, I dared to look back. I couldn't see either launch. I raised myself higher, then turned a full circle in case I'd grown disoriented, but nothing came into sight. I checked the stars, and my field sense. The launches should not have been over the horizon. I trod water, riding the swell, and tried not to think about how tired I was. It was at least two milliradians to the nearest boat. Good swimmers— some younger than I was— competed in marathons over distances like that, but I'd never even aspired to such feats of endurance. Unprepared, in the middle of the night, I knew I wouldn't make it. If the man had given up on me, would he have taken our launch? When they cost so little, and the markings were so hard to change? That would be nothing but an admission of guilt. So why couldn't I see it? Either he'd sent it on its way, or it had decided to return home itself. I knew the path it would have taken; I would have seen it go by, if I'd been looking for it when I'd surfaced before. But I had no hope of catching it now. I began to pray. I knew I'd been wrong to leave the others, but I asked for forgiveness, and felt it being granted. I watched the horizon almost calmly— smiling at the blue flashes of meteors burning up high above the ocean— Beatrice would not abandon me. I was still praying— treading water, shivering from the cool of the air— when a blue light appeared in the

distance. It disappeared as the swell took me down again, but there was no mistaking it for a shooting star. Was this Daniel and the others— or the stranger? I didn't have long to decide; if I wanted to get within earshot as they passed, I'd have to swim hard. I closed my eyes and prayed for guidance. Please Holy Beatrice, let me know. Joy flooded through my mind, instantly: it was them, I was certain of it. I set off as fast as I could. I started yelling before I could see how many passengers there were, but I knew Beatrice would never allow me to be mistaken. A flare shot up from the launch, revealing four figures standing side by side, scanning the water. I shouted with jubilation, and waved my arms. Someone finally spotted me, and they brought the launch around toward me. By the time I was on board I was so charged up on adrenaline and relief that I almost believed I could have dived back into the water and raced them home. I thought Daniel would be angry, but when I described what had happened all he said was, "We'd better get moving." Agnes embraced me. Bartholomew gave me an almost respectful look, but Rachel muttered sourly, "You're an idiot, Martin. You don't know how lucky you are." I said, "I know." Our parents were standing on deck. The empty launch had arrived some time ago; they'd been about to set out to look for us. When the others had departed I began recounting everything again, this time trying to play down any element of danger. Before I'd finished, my mother grabbed Daniel by the front of his shirt and started slapping him. "I trusted you with him? You maniac! I trusted you!" Daniel half raised his arm to block her, but then let it drop and just turned his face to the deck. I burst into tears. "It was my fault!" Our parents never struck us; I couldn't believe what I was seeing. My father said soothingly, "Look ... he's home now. He's safe. No one touched him." He put an arm around my shoulders and asked warily, "That's right, Martin, isn't it?" I nodded tearfully. This was worse than anything that had happened on the launch, or in the water; I felt a thousand times more helpless, a thousand times more like a child. I said, "Beatrice was watching over me." My mother rolled her eyes and laughed wildly, letting go of Daniel's shirt. "Beatrice? Beatrice? Don't you know what could have happened to you? You're too young to have given him what he wanted. He would have had to use the knife." The chill of my wet clothes seemed to penetrate deeper. I swayed unsteadily, but fought to stay upright. Then I whispered stubbornly, "Beatrice was there." My father said, "Go and get changed, or you're going to freeze to death." I lay in bed listening to them shout at Daniel. When he finally came down the ladder I was so sick with shame that I wished I'd drowned.

He said, "Are you all right?" There was nothing I could say. I couldn't ask him to forgive me. "Martin?" Daniel turned on the lamp. His face was streaked with tears; he laughed softly, wiping them away. "Fuck, you had me worried. Don't ever do anything like that again." "I won't." "Okay." That was it; no shouting, no recriminations. "Do you want to pray with me?" We knelt side by side, praying for our parents to be at peace, praying for the man who'd tried to hurt me. I started trembling; everything was catching up with me. Suddenly, words began gushing from my mouth— words I neither recognized nor understood, though I knew I was praying for everything to be all right with Daniel, praying that our parents would stop blaming him for my stupidity. The strange words kept flowing out of me, an incomprehensible torrent somehow imbued with everything I was feeling. I knew what was happening: Beatrice had given me the Angels' tongue. We'd had to surrender all knowledge of it when we became flesh, but sometimes She granted people the ability to pray this way, because the language of the Angels could express things we could no longer put into words. Daniel had been able to do it ever since his Drowning, but it wasn't something you could teach, or even something you could ask for. When I finally stopped, my mind was racing. "Maybe Beatrice planned everything that happened tonight? Maybe She arranged it all, to lead up to this moment!" Daniel shook his head, wincing slightly. "Don't get carried away. You have the gift; just accept it." He nudged me with his shoulder. "Now get into bed, before we're both in more trouble." I lay awake almost until dawn, overwhelmed with happiness. Daniel had forgiven me. Beatrice had protected and blessed me. I felt no more shame, just humility and amazement. I knew I'd done nothing to deserve it, but my life was wrapped in the love of God. THREE According to the Scriptures, the oceans of Earth were storm-tossed, and filled with dangerous creatures. But on Covenant, the oceans were calm, and the Angels created nothing in the ecopoiesis that would harm their own mortal incarnations. The four continents and the four oceans were rendered equally hospitable, and just as women and men were made indistinguishable in the sight of God, so were Freelanders and Firmlanders. (Some commentators insisted that this was literally true: God chose to blind Herself to where we lived, and whether or not we'd been born with a penis. I thought that was a beautiful idea, even if I couldn't quite grasp the logistics of it.) I'd heard that certain obscure sects taught that half the Angels had actually become embodied as a separate people who could live in the water and breathe beneath the surface, but then God destroyed them because they were a mockery of Beatrice's death. No legitimate church took this notion seriously, though, and archaeologists had found no trace of these mythical doomed cousins. Humans were humans,

there was only one kind. Freelanders and Firmlanders could even intermarry— if they could agree where to live. When I was fifteen, Daniel became engaged to Agnes from the Prayer Group. That made sense: they'd be spared the explanations and arguments about the Drowning that they might have faced with partners who weren't so blessed. Agnes was a Freelander, of course, but a large branch of her family, and a smaller branch of ours, were Firmlanders, so after long negotiations it was decided that the wedding would be held in Ferez, a coastal town. I went with my father to pick a hull to be fitted out as Daniel and Agnes's boat. The breeder, Diana, had a string of six mature hulls in tow, and my father insisted on walking out onto their backs and personally examining each one for imperfections. By the time we reached the fourth I was losing patience. I muttered, "It's the skin underneath that matters." In fact, you could tell a lot about a hull's general condition from up here, but there wasn't much point worrying about a few tiny flaws high above the waterline. My father nodded thoughtfully. "That's true. You'd better get in the water and check their undersides." "I'm not doing that." We couldn't simply trust this woman to sell us a healthy hull for a decent price; that wouldn't have been sufficiently embarrassing. "Martin! This is for the safety of your brother and sister-in-law." I glanced at Diana to show her where my sympathies lay, then slipped off my shirt and dived in. I swam down to the last hull in the row, then ducked beneath it. I began the job with perverse thoroughness, running my fingers over every square nanoradian of skin. I was determined to annoy my father by taking even longer than he wanted— and determined to impress Diana by examining all six hulls without coming up for air. An unfitted hull rode higher in the water than a boat full of furniture and junk, but I was surprised to discover that even in the creature's shadow there was enough light for me to see the skin clearly. After a while I realized that, paradoxically, this was because the water was slightly cloudier than usual, and whatever the fine particles were, they were scattering sunlight into the shadows. Moving through the warm, bright water, feeling the love of Beatrice more strongly than I had for a long time, it was impossible to remain angry with my father. He wanted the best hull for Daniel and Agnes, and so did I. As for impressing Diana ... who was I kidding? She was a grown woman, at least as old as Agnes, and highly unlikely to view me as anything more than a child. By the time I'd finished with the third hull I was feeling short of breath, so I surfaced and reported cheerfully, "No blemishes so far!" Diana smiled down at me. "You've got strong lungs." All six hulls were in perfect condition. We ended up taking the one at the end of the row, because it was easiest to detach. ***

Ferez was built on the mouth of a river, but the docks were some distance upstream. That helped to prepare us; the gradual deadening of the waves was less of a shock than an instant transition from sea to land would have been. When I jumped from the deck to the pier, though, it was like colliding with something massive and unyielding, the rock of the planet itself. I'd been on land twice before, for less than a day on both occasions. The wedding celebrations would last ten days, but at least we'd still be able to sleep on the boat. As the four of us walked along the crowded streets, heading for the ceremonial hall where everything but the wedding sacrament itself would take place, I stared uncouthly at everyone in sight. Almost no one was barefoot like us, and after a few hundred tau on the paving stones— much rougher than any deck— I could understand why. Our clothes were different, our skin was darker, our accent was unmistakably foreign ... but no one stared back. Freelanders were hardly a novelty here. That made me even more self-conscious; the curiosity I felt wasn't mutual. In the hall, I joined in with the preparations, mainly just lugging furniture around under the directions of one of Agnes's tyrannical uncles. It was a new kind of shock to see so many Freelanders together in this alien environment, and stranger still when I realized that I couldn't necessarily spot the Firmlanders among us; there was no sharp dividing line in physical appearance, or even clothing. I began to feel slightly guilty; if God couldn't tell the difference, what was I doing hunting for the signs? At noon, we all ate outside, in a garden behind the hall. The grass was soft, but it made my feet itch. Daniel had gone off to be fitted for wedding clothes, and my parents were performing some vital task of their own; I only recognized a handful of the people around me. I sat in the shade of a tree, pretending to be oblivious to the plant's enormous size and bizarre anatomy. I wondered if we'd take a siesta; I couldn't imagine falling asleep on the grass. Someone sat down beside me, and I turned. "I'm Lena. Agnes's second cousin." "I'm Daniel's brother, Martin." I hesitated, then offered her my hand; she took it, smiling slightly. I'd awkwardly kissed a dozen strangers that morning, all distant prospective relatives, but this time I didn't dare. "Brother of the groom, doing grunt work with the rest of us." She shook her head in mocking admiration. I desperately wanted to say something witty in reply, but an attempt that failed would be even worse than merely being dull. "Do you live in Ferez?" "No, Mitar. Inland from here. We're staying with my uncle." She pulled a face. "Along with ten other people. No privacy. It's awful." I said, "It was easy for us. We just brought our home with us." You idiot. As if she didn't know that. Lena smiled. "I haven't been on a boat in years. You'll have to give me a tour sometime." "Of course. I'd be happy to." I knew she was only making small talk; she'd never take me up on the offer. She said, "Is it just you and Daniel?"

"Yes." "You must be close." I shrugged. "What about you?" "Two brothers. Both younger. Eight and nine. They're all right, I suppose." She rested her chin on one hand and gazed at me coolly. I looked away, disconcerted by more than my wishful thinking about what lay behind that gaze. Unless her parents had been awfully young when she was born, it didn't seem likely that more children were planned. So did an odd number in the family mean that one had died, or that the custom of equal numbers carried by each parent wasn't followed where she lived? I'd studied the region less than a year ago, but I had a terrible memory for things like that. Lena said, "You looked so lonely, off here on your own." I turned back to her, surprised. "I'm never lonely." "No?" She seemed genuinely curious. I opened my mouth to tell her about Beatrice, but then changed my mind. The few times I'd said anything to friends— ordinary friends, not Drowned ones— I'd regretted it. Not everyone had laughed, but they'd all been acutely embarrassed by the revelation. I said, "Mitar has a million people, doesn't it?" "Yes." "An area of ocean the same size would have a population of ten." Lena frowned. "That's a bit too deep for me, I'm afraid." She rose to her feet. "But maybe you'll think of a way of putting it that even a Firmlander can understand." She raised a hand goodbye and started walking away. I said, "Maybe I will." *** The wedding took place in Ferez's Deep Church, a spaceship built of stone, glass, and wood. It looked almost like a parody of the churches I was used to, though it probably bore a closer resemblance to the Angels' real ship than anything made of living hulls. Daniel and Agnes stood before the priest, beneath the apex of the building. Their closest relatives stood behind them in two angled lines on either side. My father— Daniel's mother— was first in our line, followed by my own mother, then me. That put me level with Rachel, who kept shooting disdainful glances my way. After my misadventure, Daniel and I had eventually been allowed to travel to the Prayer

Group meetings again, but less than a year later I'd lost interest, and soon after I'd also stopped going to church. Beatrice was with me, constantly, and no gatherings or ceremonies could bring me any closer to Her. I knew Daniel disapproved of this attitude, but he didn't lecture me about it, and my parents had accepted my decision without any fuss. If Rachel thought I was some kind of apostate, that was her problem. The priest said, "Which of you brings a bridge to this marriage?" Daniel said, "I do." In the Transitional ceremony, they no longer asked this; it was really no one else's business— and in a way the question was almost sacrilegious. Still, Deep Church theologians had explained away greater doctrinal inconsistencies than this, so who was I to argue? "Do you, Daniel and Agnes, solemnly declare that this bridge will be the bond of your union until death, to be shared with no other person?" They replied together, "We solemnly declare." "Do you solemnly declare that as you share this bridge, so shall you share every joy and every burden of marriage— equally?" "We solemnly declare." My mind wandered; I thought of Lena's parents. Maybe one of the family's children was adopted. Lena and I had managed to sneak away to the boat three times so far, early in the evenings while my parents were still out. We'd done things I'd never done with anyone else, but I still hadn't had the courage to ask her anything so personal. Suddenly the priest was saying, "In the eyes of God, you are one now." My father started weeping softly. As Daniel and Agnes kissed, I felt a surge of contradictory emotions. I'd miss Daniel, but I was glad that I'd finally have a chance to live apart from him. And I wanted him to be happy— I was jealous of his happiness already— but at the same time, the thought of marrying someone like Agnes filled me with claustrophobia. She was kind, devout, and generous. She and Daniel would treat each other, and their children, well. But neither of them would present the slightest challenge to the other's most cherished beliefs. This recipe for harmony terrified me. Not least because I was afraid that Beatrice approved, and wanted me to follow it myself. *** Lena put her hand over mine and pushed my fingers deeper into her, gasping. We were sitting on my bunk, face to face, my legs stretched out flat, hers arching over them. She slid the palm of her other hand over my penis. I bent forward and kissed her, moving my thumb over the place she'd shown me, and her shudder ran through both of us. "Martin?"

"What?" She stroked me with one fingertip; somehow it was far better than having her whole hand wrapped around me. "Do you want to come inside me?" I shook my head. "Why not?" She kept moving her finger, tracing the same line; I could barely think. Why not? "You might get pregnant." She laughed. "Don't be stupid. I can control that. You'll learn, too. It's just a matter of experience." I said, "I'll use my tongue. You liked that." "I did. But I want something more now. And you do, too. I can tell." She smiled imploringly. "It'll be nice for both of us, I promise. Nicer than anything you've done in your life." "Don't bet on it." Lena made a sound of disbelief, and ran her thumb around the base of my penis. "I can tell you haven't put this inside anyone before. But that's nothing to be ashamed of." "Who said I was ashamed?" She nodded gravely. "All right. Frightened." I pulled my hand free, and banged my head on the bunk above us. Daniel's old bunk. Lena reached up and put her hand on my cheek. I said, "I can't. We're not married." She frowned. "I heard you'd given up on all that." "All what?" "Religion." "Then you were misinformed." Lena said, "This is what the Angels made our bodies to do. How can there be anything sinful in that?" She ran her hand down my neck, over my chest. "But the bridge is meant to ..." What? All the Scriptures said was that it was meant to unite men and women, equally. And the Scriptures said God couldn't tell women and men apart, but in the Deep Church, in the sight of God, the priest had just made Daniel claim priority. So why should I care what any

priest thought? I said, "All right." "Are you sure?" "Yes." I took her face in my hands and started kissing her. After a while, she reached down and guided me in. The shock of pleasure almost made me come, but I stopped myself somehow. When the risk of that had lessened, we wrapped our arms around each other and rocked slowly back and forth. It wasn't better than my Drowning, but it was so much like it that it had to be blessed by Beatrice. And as we moved in each other's arms, I grew determined to ask Lena to marry me. She was intelligent and strong. She questioned everything. It didn't matter that she was a Firmlander; we could meet halfway, we could live in Ferez. I felt myself ejaculate. "I'm sorry." Lena whispered, "That's all right, that's all right. Just keep moving." I was still hard; that had never happened before. I could feel her muscles clenching and releasing rhythmically, in time with our motion, and her slow exhalations. Then she cried out, and dug her fingers into my back. I tried to slide partly out of her again, but it was impossible, she was holding me too tightly. This was it. There was no going back. Now I was afraid. "I've never—" Tears were welling up in my eyes; I tried to shake them away. "I know. And I know it's frightening." She embraced me more tightly. "Just feel it, though. Isn't it wonderful?" I was hardly aware of my motionless penis anymore, but there was liquid fire flowing through my groin, waves of pleasure spreading deeper. I said, "Yes. Is it like that for you?" "It's different. But it's just as good. You'll find out for yourself, soon enough." "I hadn't been thinking that far ahead," I confessed. Lena giggled. "You've got a whole new life in front of you, Martin. You don't know what you've been missing." She kissed me, then started pulling away. I cried out in pain, and she stopped. "I'm sorry. I'll take it slowly." I reached down to touch the place where we were joined; there was a trickle of blood escaping from the base of my penis. Lena said, "You're not going to faint on me, are you?" "Don't be stupid." I did feel queasy, though. "What if I'm not ready? What if I can't do it?" "Then I'll lose my hold in a few hundred tau. The Angels weren't completely stupid." I ignored this blasphemy, though it wasn't just any Angel who'd designed our bodies— it was Beatrice

Herself. I said, "Just promise you won't use a knife." "That's not funny. That really happens to people." "I know." I kissed her shoulder. "I think—" Lena straightened her legs slightly, and I felt the core break free inside me. Blood flowed warmly from my groin, but the pain had changed from a threat of damage to mere tenderness; my nervous system no longer spanned the lesion. I asked Lena, "Do you feel it? Is it part of you?" "Not yet. It takes a while for the connections to form." She ran her fingers over my lips. "Can I stay inside you, until they have?" I nodded happily. I hardly cared about the sensations anymore; it was just contemplating the miracle of being able to give a part of my body to Lena that was wonderful. I'd studied the physiological details long ago, everything from the exchange of nutrients to the organ's independent immune system— and I knew that Beatrice had used many of the same techniques for the bridge as She'd used with gestating embryos— but to witness Her ingenuity so dramatically at work in my own flesh was both shocking and intensely moving. Only giving birth could bring me closer to Her than this. When we finally separated, though, I wasn't entirely prepared for the sight of what emerged. "Oh, that is disgusting!" Lena shook her head, laughing. "New ones always look a bit ... encrusted. Most of that stuff will wash away, and the rest will fall off in a few kilotau." I bunched up the sheet to find a clean spot, then dabbed at my— her— penis. My newly formed vagina had stopped bleeding, but it was finally dawning on me just how much mess we'd made. "I'm going to have to wash this before my parents get back. I can put it out to dry in the morning, after they're gone, but if I don't wash it now they'll smell it." We cleaned ourselves enough to put on shorts, then Lena helped me carry the sheet up onto the deck and drape it in the water from the laundry hooks. The fibers in the sheet would use nutrients in the water to power the self-cleaning process. The docks appeared deserted; most of the boats nearby belonged to people who'd come for the wedding. I'd told my parents I was too tired to stay on at the celebrations; tonight they'd continue until dawn, though Daniel and Agnes would probably leave by midnight. To do what Lena and I had just done. "Martin? Are you shivering?" There was nothing to be gained by putting it off. Before whatever courage I had could desert me, I said, "Will you marry me?" "Very funny. Oh—" Lena took my hand. "I'm sorry, I never know when you're joking." I said, "We've exchanged the bridge. It doesn't matter that we weren't married first, but it would make things easier if we went along with convention."

"Martin—" "Or we could just live together, if that's what you want. I don't care. We're already married in the eyes of Beatrice." Lena bit her lip. "I don't want to live with you." "I could move to Mitar. I could get a job." Lena shook her head, still holding my hand. She said firmly, "No. You knew, before we did anything, what it would and wouldn't mean. You don't want to marry me, and I don't want to marry you. So snap out of it." I pulled my hand free, and sat down on the deck. What had I done? I'd thought I'd had Beatrice's blessing, I'd thought this was all in Her plan ... but I'd just been fooling myself. Lena sat beside me. "What are you worried about? Your parents finding out?" "Yes." That was the least of it, but it seemed pointless trying to explain the truth. I turned to her. "When could we—?" "Not for about ten days. And sometimes it's longer after the first time." I'd known as much, but I'd hoped her experience might contradict my theoretical knowledge. Ten days. We'd both be gone by then. Lena said, "What do you think, you can never get married now? How many marriages do you imagine involve the bridge one of the partners was born with?" "Nine out of ten. Unless they're both women." Lena gave me a look that hovered between tenderness and incredulity. "My estimate is about one in five." I shook my head. "I don't care. We've exchanged the bridge, we have to be together." Lena's expression hardened, then so did my resolve. "Or I have to get it back." "Martin, that's ridiculous. You'll find another lover soon enough, and then you won't even know what you were worried about. Or maybe you'll fall in love with a nice Deep Church boy, and then you'll both be glad you've been spared the trouble of getting rid of the extra bridge." "Yeah? Or maybe he'll just be disgusted that I couldn't wait until I really was doing it for him!" Lena groaned, and stared up at the sky. "Did I say something before about the Angels getting things right? Ten thousand years without bodies, and they thought they were qualified—" I cut her off angrily. "Don't be so fucking blasphemous? Beatrice knew exactly what She was doing. If we mess it up, that's our fault!" Lena said, matter-of-factly, "In ten years' time, there'll be a pill you'll be able to take to keep the bridge from being passed, and another pill to make it pass when it otherwise wouldn't. We'll win control of our

bodies back from the Angels, and start doing exactly what we like with them." "That's sick. That really is sick." I stared at the deck, suffocating in misery. This was what I'd wanted, wasn't it? A lover who was the very opposite of Daniel's sweet, pious Agnes? Except that in my fantasies, we'd always had a lifetime to debate our philosophical differences. Not one night to be torn apart by them. I had nothing to lose, now. I told Lena about my Drowning. She didn't laugh; she listened in silence. I said, "Do you believe me?" "Of course." She hesitated. "But have you ever wondered if there might be another explanation for the way you felt, in the water that night? You were starved of oxygen—" "People are starved of oxygen all the time. Freelander kids spend half their lives trying to stay underwater longer than the last time." Lena nodded. "Sure. But that's not quite the same, is it? You were pushed beyond the time you could have stayed under by sheer willpower. And ... you were cued, you were told what to expect." "That's not true. Daniel never told me what it would be like. I was surprised when it happened." I gazed back at her calmly, ready to counter any ingenious hypothesis she came up with. I felt chastened, but almost at peace now. This was what Beatrice had expected of me, before we'd exchanged the bridge: not a dead ceremony in a dead building, but the honesty to tell Lena exactly who she'd be making love with. We argued almost until sunrise; neither of us convinced the other of anything. Lena helped me drag the clean sheet out of the water and hide it below deck. Before she left, she wrote down the address of a friend's house in Mitar, and a place and time we could meet. Keeping that appointment was the hardest thing I'd ever done in my life. I spent three solid days ingratiating myself with my Mitar-based cousins, to the point where they would have had to be openly hostile to get out of inviting me to stay with them after the wedding. Once I was there, I had to scheme and lie relentlessly to ensure that I was free of them on the predetermined day. In a stranger's house, in the middle of the afternoon, Lena and I joylessly reversed everything that had happened between us. I'd been afraid that the act itself might rekindle all my stupid illusions, but when we parted on the street outside, I felt as if I hardly knew her. I ached even more than I had on the boat, and my groin was palpably swollen, but in a couple of days, I knew, nothing less than a lover's touch or a medical examination would reveal what I'd done. In the train back to the coast, I replayed the entire sequence of events in my mind, again and again. How could I have been so wrong? People always talked about the power of sex to confuse and deceive you, but I'd always believed that was just cheap cynicism. Besides, I hadn't blindly surrendered to sex; I'd thought I'd been guided by Beatrice. If I could be wrong about that—

I'd have to be more careful. Beatrice always spoke clearly, but I'd have to listen to Her with much more patience and humility. That was it. That was what She'd wanted me to learn. I finally relaxed and looked out the window, at the blur of forest passing by, another triumph of the ecopoiesis. If I needed proof that there was always another chance, it was all around me now. The Angels had traveled as far from God as anyone could travel, and yet God had turned around and given them Covenant. FOUR I was nineteen when I returned to Mitar, to study at the city's university. Originally, I'd planned to specialize in the ecopoiesis— and to study much closer to home— but in the end I'd had to accept the nearest thing on offer, geographically and intellectually: working with Barat, a Firmlander biologist whose real interest was native microfauna. "Angelic technology is a fascinating subject in its own right," he told me. "But we can't hope to work backward and decipher terrestrial evolution from anything the Angels created. The best we can do is try to understand what Covenant's own biosphere was like, before we arrived and disrupted it." I managed to persuade him to accept a compromise: my thesis would involve the impact of the ecopoiesis on the native microfauna. That would give me an excuse to study the Angels' inventions, alongside the drab unicellular creatures that had inhabited Covenant for the last billion years. "The impact of the ecopoiesis" was far too broad a subject, of course; with Barat's help, I narrowed it down to one particular unresolved question. There had long been geological evidence that the surface waters of the ocean had become both more alkaline, and less oxygenated, as new species shifted the balance of dissolved gases. Some native species must have retreated from the wave of change, and perhaps some had been wiped out completely, but there was a thriving population of zooytes in the upper layers at present. So had they been there all along, adapting in situ? Or had they migrated from somewhere else? Mitar's distance from the coast was no real handicap in studying the ocean; the university mounted regular expeditions, and I had plenty of library and lab work to do before embarking on anything so obvious as gathering living samples in their natural habitat. What's more, river water, and even rainwater, was teeming with closely related species, and since it was possible that these were the reservoirs from which the "ravaged" ocean had been recolonized, I had plenty of subjects worth studying close at hand. Barat set high standards, but he was no tyrant, and his other students made me feel welcome. I was homesick, but not morbidly so, and I took a kind of giddy pleasure from the vivid dreams and underlying sense of disorientation that living on land induced in me. I wasn't exactly fulfilling my childhood ambition to uncover the secrets of the Angels— and I had fewer opportunities than I'd hoped to get side-tracked on the ecopoiesis itself— but once I started delving into the minutiae of Covenant's original, wholly undesigned biochemistry, it turned out to be complex and elegant enough to hold my attention. I was only miserable when I let myself think about sex. I didn't want to end up like Daniel, so seeking out another Drowned person to marry was the last thing on my mind. But I couldn't face the prospect of repeating my mistake with Lena; I had no intention of becoming physically intimate with anyone unless we were already close enough for me to tell them about the most important thing in my life. But that wasn't the order in which things happened here. After a few humiliating attempts to swim against the current, I

gave up on the whole idea, and threw myself into my work instead. Of course, it was possible to socialize at Mitar University without actually exchanging bridges with anyone. I joined an informal discussion group on Angelic culture, which met in a small room in the students' building every tenth night— just like the old Prayer Group, though I was under no illusion that this one would be stacked with believers. It hardly needed to be. The Angels' legacy could be analyzed perfectly well without reference to Beatrice's divinity. The Scriptures were written long after the Crossing by people of a simpler age; there was no reason to treat them as infallible. If non-believers could shed some light on any aspect of the past, I had no grounds for rejecting their insights. "It's obvious that only one faction came to Covenant!" That was Céline, an anthropologist, a woman so much like Lena that I had to make a conscious effort to remind myself, every time I set eyes on her, that nothing could ever happen between us. "We're not so homogeneous that we'd all choose to travel to another planet and assume a new physical form, whatever cultural forces might drive one small group to do that. So why should the Angels have been unanimous? The other factions must still be living in the Immaterial Cities, on Earth, and on other planets." "Then why haven't they contacted us? In twenty thousand years, you'd think they'd drop in and say hello once or twice." David was a mathematician, a Freelander from the southern ocean. Céline replied, "The attitude of the Angels who came here wouldn't have encouraged visitors. If all we have is a story of the Crossing in which Beatrice persuades every last Angel in existence to give up immortality— a version that simply erases everyone else from history— that doesn't suggest much of a desire to remain in touch." A woman I didn't know interjected, "It might not have been so clear-cut from the start, though. There's evidence of settler-level technology being deployed for more than three thousand years after the Crossing, long after it was needed for the ecopoiesis. New species continued to be created, engineering projects continued to use advanced materials and energy sources. But then in less than a century, it all stopped. The Scriptures merge three separate decisions into one: renouncing immortality, migrating to Covenant, and abandoning the technology that might have provided an escape route if anyone changed their mind. But we know it didn't happen like that. Three thousand years after the Crossing, something changed. The whole experiment suddenly became irreversible." These speculations would have outraged the average pious Freelander, let alone the average Drowned one, but I listened calmly, even entertaining the possibility that some of them could be true. The love of Beatrice was the only fixed point in my cosmology; everything else was open to debate. Still, sometimes the debate was hard to take. One night, David joined us straight from a seminar of physicists. What he'd heard from the speaker was unsettling enough, but he'd already moved beyond it to an even less palatable conclusion. "Why did the Angels choose mortality? After ten thousand years without death, why did they throw away all the glorious possibilities ahead of them, to come and die like animals on this ball of mud?" I had to bite my tongue to keep from replying to his rhetorical question: because God is the only source of eternal life, and Beatrice showed them that all they really had was a cheap parody of that divine gift. David paused, then offered his own answer— which was itself a kind of awful parody of Beatrice's truth. "Because they discovered that they weren't immortal, after all. They discovered that no one can be. We've always known, as they must have, that the universe is finite in space and time. It's destined to

collapse eventually: 'the stars will fall from the sky.' But it's easy to imagine ways around that." He laughed. "We don't know enough physics yet, ourselves, to rule out anything. I've just heard an extraordinary woman from Tia talk about coding our minds into waves that would orbit the shrinking universe so rapidly that we could think an infinite number of thoughts before everything was crushed!" David grinned joyfully at the sheer audacity of this notion. I thought primly: what blasphemous nonsense. Then he spread his arms and said, "Don't you see, though? If the Angels had pinned their hopes on something like that— some ingenious trick that would keep them from sharing the fate of the universe— but then they finally gained enough knowledge to rule out every last escape route, it would have had a profound effect on them. Some small faction could then have decided that since they were mortal after all, they might as well embrace the inevitable, and come to terms with it in the way their ancestors had. In the flesh." Céline said thoughtfully, "And the Beatrice myth puts a religious gloss on the whole thing, but that might be nothing but a post hoc reinterpretation of a purely secular revelation." This was too much; I couldn't remain silent. I said, "If Covenant really was founded by a pack of terminally depressed atheists, what could have changed their minds? Where did the desire to impose a ' post hoc reinterpretation' come from? If the revelation that brought the Angels here was 'secular,' why isn't the whole planet still secular today?" Someone said snidely, "Civilization collapsed. What do you expect?" I opened my mouth to respond angrily, but Céline got in first. "No, Martin has a point. If David's right, the rise of religion needs to be explained more urgently than ever. And I don't think anyone's in a position to do that yet." Afterward, I lay awake thinking about all the other things I should have said, all the other objections I should have raised. (And thinking about Céline. Theology aside, the whole dynamics of the group was starting to get under my skin; maybe I'd be better off spending my time in the lab, impressing Barat with my dedication to his pointless fucking microbes. Or maybe I'd be better off at home. I could help out on the boat; my parents weren't young anymore, and Daniel had his own family to look after. I climbed out of bed and started packing, but halfway through I changed my mind. I didn't really want to abandon my studies. And I'd known all along what the antidote was for all the confusion and resentment I was feeling. I put my rucksack away, switched off the lamp, lay down, closed my eyes, and asked Beatrice to grant me peace. *** I was awakened by someone banging on the door of my room. It was a fellow boarder, a young man I barely knew. He looked extremely tired and irritable, but something was overriding his irritation. "There's a message for you."

My mother was sick, with an unidentified virus. The hospital was even further away than our home grounds; the trip would take almost three days. I spent most of the journey praying, but the longer I prayed, the harder it became. I knew that it was possible to save my mother's life with one word in the Angels' tongue to Beatrice, but the number of ways in which I could fail, corrupting the purity of the request with my own doubts, my own selfishness, my own complacency, just kept multiplying. The Angels created nothing in the ecopoiesis that would harm their own mortal incarnations. The native life showed no interest in parasitizing us. But over the millennia, our own DNA had shed viruses. And since Beatrice Herself chose every last base pair, that must have been what She intended. Aging was not enough. Mortal injury was not enough. Death had to come without warning, silent and invisible. That's what the Scriptures said. The hospital was a maze of linked hulls. When I finally found the right passageway, the first person I recognized in the distance was Daniel. He was holding his daughter Sophie high in his outstretched arms, smiling up at her. The image dispelled all my fears in an instant; I almost fell to my knees to give thanks. Then I saw my father. He was seated outside the room, his head in his hands. I couldn't see his face, but I didn't need to. He wasn't anxious, or exhausted. He was crushed. I approached in a haze of last-minute prayers, though I knew I was asking for the past to be rewritten. Daniel started to greet me as if nothing was wrong, asking about the trip— probably trying to soften the blow— then he registered my expression and put a hand on my shoulder. He said, "She's with God now." I brushed past him and walked into the room. My mother's body was lying on the bed, already neatly arranged: arms straightened, eyes closed. Tears ran down my cheeks, angering me. Where had my love been when it might have prevented this? When Beatrice might have heeded it? Daniel followed me into the room, alone. I glanced back through the doorway and saw Agnes holding Sophie. "She's with God, Martin." He was beaming at me as if something wonderful had happened. I said numbly, "She wasn't Drowned." I was almost certain that she hadn't been a believer at all. She'd remained in the Transitional church all her life— but that had long been the way to stay in touch with your friends when you worked on a boat nine days out of ten. "I prayed with her, before she lost consciousness. She accepted Beatrice into her heart." I stared at him. Nine years ago he'd been certain: you were Drowned, or you were damned. It was as simple as that. My own conviction had softened long ago; I couldn't believe that Beatrice really was so arbitrary and cruel. But I knew my mother would not only have refused the full-blown ritual; the whole philosophy would have been as nonsensical to her as the mechanics. "Did she say that? Did she tell you that?"

Daniel shook his head. "But it was clear." Filled with the love of Beatrice, he couldn't stop smiling. A wave of revulsion passed through me; I wanted to grind his face into the deck. He didn't care what my mother had believed. Whatever eased his own pain, whatever put his own doubts to rest, had to be the case. To accept that she was damned— or even just dead, gone, erased— was unbearable; everything else flowed from that. There was no truth in anything he said, anything he believed. It was all just an expression of his own needs. I walked back into the corridor and crouched beside my father. Without looking at me, he put an arm around me and pressed me against his side. I could feel the blackness washing over him, the helplessness, the loss. When I tried to embrace him he just clutched me more tightly, forcing me to be still. I shuddered a few times, then stopped weeping. I closed my eyes and let him hold me. I was determined to stay there beside him, facing everything he was facing. But after a while, unbidden, the old flame began to glow in the back of my skull: the old warmth, the old peace, the old certainty. Daniel was right, my mother was with God. How could I have doubted that? There was no point asking how it had come about; Beatrice's ways were beyond my comprehension. But the one thing I knew firsthand was the strength of Her love. I didn't move, I didn't free myself from my father's desolate embrace. But I was an impostor now, merely praying for his comfort, interceding from my state of grace. Beatrice had raised me out of the darkness, and I could no longer share his pain. FIVE After my mother's death, my faith kept ceding ground, without ever really wavering. Most of the doctrinal content fell away, leaving behind a core of belief that was a great deal easier to defend. It didn't matter if the Scriptures were superstitious nonsense or the Church was full of fools and hypocrites; Beatrice was still Beatrice, the way the sky was still blue. Whenever I heard debates between atheists and believers, I found myself increasingly on the atheists' side— not because I accepted their conclusion for a moment, but because they were so much more honest than their opponents. Maybe the priests and theologians arguing against them had the same kind of direct, personal experience of God as I did— or maybe not, maybe they just desperately needed to believe. But they never disclosed the true source of their conviction; instead, they just made laughable attempts to "prove" God's existence from the historical record, or from biology, astronomy, or mathematics. Daniel had been right at the age of fifteen— you couldn't prove any such thing— and listening to these people twist logic as they tried made me squirm. I felt guilty about leaving my father working with a hired hand, and even guiltier when he moved onto Daniel's boat a year later, but I knew how angry it would have made him if he thought I'd abandoned my career for his sake. At times, that was the only thing that kept me in Mitar: even when I honestly wanted nothing more than to throw it all in and go back to hauling nets, I was afraid that my decision would be misinterpreted. It took me three years to complete my thesis on the migration of aquatic zooytes in the wake of the ecopoiesis. My original hypothesis, that freshwater species had replenished the upper ocean, turned out to be false. Zooytes had no genes as such, just families of enzymes that resynthesized each other after cell division, but comparisons of these heritable molecules showed that, rather than rain bringing new life from

above, an ocean-dwelling species from a much greater depth had moved steadily closer to the surface, as the Angels' creations drained oxygen from the water. That wouldn't have been much of a surprise, if the same techniques hadn't also shown that several species found in river water were even closer relatives of the surface dwellers. But those freshwater species weren't anyone's ancestors; they were the newest migrants. Zooytes that had spent a billion years confined to the depths had suddenly been able to survive (and reproduce, and mutate) closer to the surface than ever before, and when they'd stumbled on a mutation that let them thrive in the presence of oxygen, they'd finally been in a position to make use of it. The ecopoiesis might have driven other native organisms into extinction, but the invasion from Earth had enabled this ancient benthic species to mount a long overdue invasion of its own. Unwittingly or not, the Angels had set in motion the sequence of events that had released it from the ocean to colonize the planet. So I proved myself wrong, earned my degree, and became famous amongst a circle of peers so small that we were all famous to each other anyway. Vast new territories did not open up before me. Anything to do with native biology was rapidly becoming an academic cul-de-sac; I'd always suspected that was how it would be, but I hadn't fought hard enough to end up anywhere else. For the next three years, I clung to the path of least resistance: assisting Barat with his own research, taking the teaching jobs no one else wanted. Most of Barat's other students moved on to better things, and I found myself increasingly alone in Mitar. But that didn't matter; I had Beatrice. At the age of twenty-five, I could see my future clearly. While other people deciphered— and built upon— the Angels' legacy, I'd watch from a distance, still messing about with samples of seawater from which all Angelic contaminants had been scrupulously removed. Finally, when it was almost too late, I made up my mind to jump ship. Barat had been good to me, but he'd never expected loyalty verging on martyrdom. At the end of the year, a bi-ecological (native and Angelic) microbiology conference was being held in Tia, possibly the last event of its kind. I had no new results to present, but it wouldn't be hard to find a plausible excuse to attend, and it would be the ideal place to lobby for a new position. My great zooyte discovery hadn't been entirely lost on the wider community of biologists; I could try to rekindle the memory of it. I doubted there'd be much point offering to sleep with anyone; ethical qualms aside, my bridge had probably rusted into place. Then again, maybe I'd get lucky. Maybe I'd stumble on a fellow Drowned Freelander who'd ended up in a position of power, and all I'd have to do was promise that my work would be for the greater glory of Beatrice. *** Tia was a city of ten million people on the east coast. New towers stood side-by-side with empty structures from the time of the Angels, giant gutted machines that might have played a role in the ecopoiesis. I was too old and proud to gawk like a child, but for all my provincial sophistication I wanted to. These domes and cylinders were twenty times older than the illustrations tattooed into the ceiling of the monastery back home. They bore no images of Beatrice; nothing of the Angels did. But why would they? They predated Her death. The university, on the outskirts of Tia, was a third the size of Mitar itself. An underground train ringed the campus; the students I rode with eyed my unstylish clothes with disbelief. I left my luggage in the

dormitory and headed straight for the conference center. Barat had chosen to stay behind; maybe he hadn't wanted to witness the public burial of his field. That made things easier for me; I'd be free to hunt for a new career without rubbing his face in it. Late additions to the conference program were listed on a screen by the main entrance. I almost walked straight past the display; I'd already decided which talks I'd be attending. But three steps away, a title I'd glimpsed in passing assembled itself in my mind's eye, and I had to backtrack to be sure I hadn't imagined it. Carla Reggia: "Euphoric Effects of Z/12/80 Excretions" I stood there laughing with disbelief. I recognized the speaker and her coworkers by name, though I'd never had a chance to meet them. If this wasn't a hoax...what had they done? Dried it, smoked it, and tried writing that up as research? Z/12/80 was one of "my" zooytes, one of the escapees from the ocean; the air and water of Tia were swarming with it. If its excretions were euphoric, the whole city would be in a state of bliss. I knew, then and there, what they'd discovered. I knew it, long before I admitted it to myself. I went to the talk with my head full of jokes about neglected culture flasks full of psychotropic breakdown products, but for two whole days, I'd been steeling myself for the truth, finding ways in which it didn't have to matter. Z/12/80, Carla explained, excreted among its waste products an amine that was able to bind to receptors in our Angel-crafted brains. Since it had been shown by other workers (no one recognized me; no one gave me so much as a glance) that Z/12/80 hadn't existed at the time of the ecopoiesis, this interaction was almost certainly undesigned, and unanticipated. "It's up to the archaeologists and neurochemists to determine what role, if any, the arrival of this substance in the environment might have played in the collapse of early settlement culture. But for the past fifteen to eighteen thousand years, we've been swimming in it. Since we still exhibit such a wide spectrum of moods, we're probably able to compensate for its presence by down-regulating the secretion of the endogenous molecule that was designed to bind to the same receptor. That's just an educated guess, though. Exactly what the effects might be from individual to individual, across the range of doses that might be experienced under a variety of conditions, is clearly going to be a matter of great interest to investigators with appropriate expertise." I told myself that I felt no disquiet. Beatrice acted on the world through the laws of nature; I'd stopped believing in supernatural miracles long ago. The fact that someone had now identified the way in which She'd acted on me, that night in the water, changed nothing. I pressed ahead with my attempts to get recruited. Everyone at the conference was talking about Carla's discovery, and when people finally made the connection with my own work, their eyes stopped glazing over halfway through my spiel. In the next three days, I received seven offers— all involving research into zooyte biochemistry. There was no question, now, of side-stepping the issue, of escaping into the wider world of Angelic biology. One man even came right out and said to me: "You're a Freelander, and you know that the ancestors of Z/12/80 live in much greater numbers in the ocean. Don't you think oceanic exposure is going to be the key to understanding this?" He laughed. "I mean, you swam in the stuff as a child, didn't you? And you seem to have come through unscathed." "Apparently." On my last night in Tia, I couldn't sleep. I stared into the blackness of the room, watching the gray sparks

dance in front of me. (Contaminants in the aqueous humor? Electrical noise in the retina? I'd heard the explanation once, but I could no longer remember it.) I prayed to Beatrice in the Angels' tongue; I could still feel Her presence, as strongly as ever. The effect clearly wasn't just a matter of dosage, or trans-cutaneous absorption; merely swimming in the ocean at the right depth wasn't enough to make anyone feel Drowned. But in combination with the stress of oxygen starvation, and all the psychological build-up Daniel had provided, the jolt of zooyte piss must have driven certain neuroendocrine subsystems into new territory— or old territory, by a new path. Peace, joy, contentment, the feeling of being loved weren't exactly unknown emotions. But by short-circuiting the brain's usual practice of summoning those feelings only on occasions when there was a reason for them, I'd been "blessed with the love of Beatrice." I'd found happiness on demand. And I still possessed it. That was the eeriest part. Even as I lay there in the dark, on the verge of reasoning everything I'd been living for out of existence, my ability to work the machinery was so ingrained that I felt as loved, as blessed as ever. Maybe Beatrice was offering me another chance, making it clear that She'd still forgive this blasphemy and welcome me back. But why did I believe that there was anyone there to "forgive me"? You couldn't reason your way to God; there was only faith. And I knew, now, that the source of my faith was a meaningless accident, an unanticipated side-effect of the ecopoiesis. I still had a choice. I could, still, decide that the love of Beatrice was immune to all logic, a force beyond understanding, untouched by evidence of any kind. No, I couldn't. I'd been making exceptions for Her for too long. Everyone lived with double standards— but I'd already pushed mine as far as they'd go. I started laughing and weeping at the same time. It was almost unimaginable: all the millions of people who'd been misled the same way. All because of the zooytes, and ... what? One Freelander; diving for pleasure, who'd stumbled on a strange new experience? Then tens of thousands more repeating it, generation after generation— until one vulnerable man or woman had been driven to invest the novelty with meaning. Someone who'd needed so badly to feel loved and protected that the illusion of a real presence behind the raw emotion had been impossible to resist. Or who'd desperately wanted to believe that— in spite of the Angels' discovery that they, too, were mortal— death could still be defeated. I was lucky: I'd been born in an era of moderation. I hadn't killed in the name of Beatrice. I hadn't suffered for my faith. I had no doubt that I'd been far happier for the last fifteen years than I would have been if I'd told Daniel to throw his rope and weights overboard without me. But that didn't change the fact that the heart of it all had been a lie. *** I woke at dawn, my head pounding, after just a few kilotau's sleep. I closed my eyes and searched for Her presence, as I had a thousand times before. When I woke in the morning and looked into my heart, She was there without fail, offering me strength and guidance. When I lay in bed at night, I feared nothing, because I knew She was watching over me.

There was nothing. She was gone. I stumbled out of bed, feeling like a murderer, wondering how I'd ever live with what I'd done. SIX I turned down every offer I'd received at the conference, and stayed on in Mitar. It took Barat and me two years to establish our own research group to examine the effects of the zooamine, and nine more for us to elucidate the full extent of its activity in the brain. Our new recruits all had solid backgrounds in neurochemistry, and they did better work than I did, but when Barat retired I found myself the spokesperson for the group. The initial discovery had been largely ignored outside the scientific community; for most people, it hardly mattered whether our brain chemistry matched the Angels' original design, or had been altered fifteen thousand years ago by some unexpected contaminant. But when the Mitar zooamine group began publishing detailed accounts of the biochemistry of religious experience, the public at large rediscovered the subject with a vengeance. The university stepped up security, and despite death threats and a number of unpleasant incidents with stone-throwing protesters, no one was hurt. We were flooded with requests from broadcasters— though most were predicated on the notion that the group was morally obliged to "face its critics," rather than the broadcasters being morally obliged to offer us a chance to explain our work, calmly and clearly, without being shouted down by enraged zealots. I learned to avoid the zealots, but the obscurantists were harder to dodge. I'd expected opposition from the Churches— defending the faith was their job, after all— but some of the most intellectually bankrupt responses came from academics in other disciplines. In one televised debate, I was confronted by a Deep Church priest, a Transitional theologian, a devotee of the ocean god Marni, and an anthropologist from Tia. "This discovery has no real bearing on any belief system," the anthropologist explained serenely. "All truth is local. Inside every Deep Church in Ferez, Beatrice is the daughter of God, and we're the mortal incarnations of the Angels, who traveled here from Earth. In a coastal village a few milliradians south, Marni is the supreme creator, and it was She who gave birth to us, right here. Going one step further and moving from the spiritual domain to the scientific might appear to 'negate' certain spiritual truths ... but equally, moving from the scientific domain to the spiritual demonstrates the same limitations. We are nothing but the stories we tell ourselves, and no one story is greater than another." He smiled beneficently, the expression of a parent only too happy to give all his squabbling children an equal share in some disputed toy. I said, "How many cultures do you imagine share your definition of 'truth'? How many people do you think would be content to worship a God who consisted of literally nothing but the fact of their belief?" I turned to the Deep Church priest. "Is that enough for you?" "Absolutely not!" She glowered at the anthropologist. "While I have the greatest respect for my brother here," she gestured at the devotee of Marni, "you can't draw a line around those people who've been lucky enough to be raised in the true faith, and then suggest that Beatrice's infinite power and love is confined to that group of people ... like some collection of folk songs!"

The devotee respectfully agreed. Marni had created the most distant stars, along with the oceans of Covenant. Perhaps some people called Her by another name, but if everyone on this planet was to die tomorrow, She would still be Marni: unchanged, undiminished. The anthropologist responded soothingly, "Of course. But in context, and with a wider perspective—" "I'm perfectly happy with a God who resides within us," offered the Transitional theologian. "It seems ... immodest to expect more. And instead of fretting uselessly over these ultimate questions, we should confine ourselves to matters of a suitably human scale." I turned to him. "So you're actually indifferent as to whether an infinitely powerful and loving being created everything around you, and plans to welcome you into Her arms after death ... or if the universe is a piece of quantum noise that will eventually vanish and erase us all?" He sighed heavily, as if I was asking him to perform some arduous physical feat just by responding. "I can summon no enthusiasm for these issues." Later, the Deep Church priest took me aside and whispered, "Frankly, we're all very grateful that you've debunked that awful cult of the Drowned. They're a bunch of fundamentalist hicks, and the Church will be better off without them. But you mustn't make the mistake of thinking that your work has anything to do with ordinary, civilized believers!" *** I stood at the back of the crowd that had gathered on the beach near the rock pool, to listen to the two old men who were standing ankle-deep in the milky water. It had taken me four days to get here from Mitar, but when I'd heard reports of a zooyte bloom washing up on the remote north coast, I'd had to come and see the results for myself. The zooamine group had actually recruited an anthropologist for such occasions— one who could cope with such taxing notions as the existence of objective reality, and a biochemical substrate for human thought— but Céline was only with us for part of the year, and right now she was away doing other research. "This is an ancient, sacred place!" one man intoned, spreading his arms to take in the pool. "You need only observe the shape of it to understand that. It concentrates the energy of the stars, and the sun, and the ocean." "The focus of power is there, by the inlet," the other added, gesturing at a point where the water might have come up to his calves. "Once, I wandered too close. I was almost lost in the great dream of the ocean, when my friend here came and rescued me!" These men weren't devotees of Marni, or members of any other formal religion. As far as I'd been able to tell from old news reports, the blooms occurred every eight or ten years, and the two had set themselves up as "custodians" of the pool more than fifty years ago. Some local villagers treated the whole thing as a joke, but others revered the old men. And for a small fee, tourists and locals alike could be chanted over, then splashed with the potent brew. Evaporation would have concentrated the trapped waters of the bloom; for a few days, before the zooytes ran out of nutrients and died en masse in a cloud of hydrogen sulphide, the amine would be present in levels as high as in any of our laboratory cultures

back in Mitar. As I watched people lining up for the ritual, I found myself trying to downplay the possibility that anyone could be seriously affected by it. It was broad daylight, no one feared for their life, and the old men's pantheistic gobbledy-gook carried all the gravitas of the patter of streetside scam merchants. Their marginal sincerity, and the money changing hands, would be enough to undermine the whole thing. This was a tourist trap, not a life-altering experience. When the chanting was done, the first customer knelt at the edge of the pool. One of the custodians filled a small metal cup with water and threw it in her face. After a moment, she began weeping with joy. I moved closer, my stomach tightening. It was what she'd known was expected of her, nothing more. She was playing along, not wanting to spoil the fun— like the good sports who pretended to have their thoughts read by a carnival psychic. Next, the custodians chanted over a young man. He began swaying giddily even before they touched him with the water; when they did, he broke into sobs of relief that racked his whole body. I looked back along the queue. There was a young girl standing third in line now, looking around apprehensively; she could not have been more than nine or ten. Her father (I presumed) was standing behind her, with his hand against her back, as if gently propelling her forward. I lost all interest in playing anthropologist. I forced my way through the crowd until I reached the edge of the pool, then turned to address the people in the queue. "These men are frauds! There's nothing mysterious going on here. I can tell you exactly what's in the water: it's just a drug, a natural substance given out by creatures that are trapped here when the waves retreat." I squatted down and prepared to dip my hand in the pool. One of the custodians rushed forward and grabbed my wrist. He was an old man, I could have done what I liked, but some people were already jeering, and I didn't want to scuffle with him and start a riot. I backed away from him, then spoke again. "I've studied this drug for more than ten years, at Mitar University. It's present in water all over the planet. We drink it, we bathe in it, we swim in it every day. But it's concentrated here, and if you don't understand what you're doing when you use it, that misunderstanding can harm you!" The custodian who'd grabbed my wrist started laughing. "The dream of the ocean is powerful, yes, but we don't need your advice on that! For fifty years, my friend and I have studied its lore, until we were strong enough to stand in the sacred water!" He gestured at his leathery feet; I didn't doubt that his circulation had grown poor enough to limit the dose to a tolerable level. He stretched out his sinewy arm at me. "So fuck off back to Mitar, Inlander? Fuck off back to your books and your dead machinery? What would you know about the sacred mysteries? What would you know about the ocean?" I said, "I think you're out of your depth." I stepped into the pool. He started wailing about my unpurified body polluting the water, but I brushed past him. The other custodian came after me, but though my feet were soft after years of wearing shoes, I ignored the sharp edges of the rocks and kept walking toward the inlet. The zooamine helped. I could feel the old joy, the old peace, the old "love"; it made a powerful anesthetic.

I looked back over my shoulder. The second man had stopped pursuing me; it seemed he honestly feared going any further. I pulled off my shirt, bunched it up, and threw it onto a rock at the side of the pool. Then I waded forward, heading straight for the "focus of power." The water came up to my knees. I could feel my heart pounding, harder than it had since childhood. People were shouting at me from the edge of the pool— some outraged by my sacrilege, some apparently concerned for my safety in the presence of forces beyond my control. Without turning, I called out at the top of my voice, "There is no 'power' here? There's nothing 'sacred'? There's nothing here but a drug—" Old habits die hard; I almost prayed first. Please, Holy Beatrice, don't let me regain my faith. I lay down in the water and let it cover my face. My vision turned white; I felt like I was leaving my body. The love of Beatrice flooded into me, and nothing had changed: Her presence was as palpable as ever, as undeniable as ever. I knew that I was loved, accepted, forgiven. I waited, staring into the light, almost expecting a voice, a vision, detailed hallucinations. That had happened to some of the Drowned. How did anyone ever claw their way back to sanity, after that? But for me, there was only the emotion itself, overpowering but unembellished. It didn't grow monotonous; I could have basked in it for days. But I understood, now, that it said no more about my place in the world than the warmth of sunlight on skin. I'd never mistake it for the touch of a real hand again. I climbed to my feet and opened my eyes. Violet afterimages danced in front of me. It took a few tau for me to catch my breath, and feel steady on my feet again. Then I turned and started wading back toward the shore. The crowd had fallen silent, though whether it was in disgust or begrudging respect I had no idea. I said, "It's not just here. It's not just in the water. It's part of us now; it's in our blood." I was still half-blind; I couldn't see whether anyone was listening. "But as long as you know that, you're already free. As long as you're ready to face the possibility that everything that makes your spirits soar, everything that lifts you up and fills your heart with joy, everything that makes your life worth living ... is a lie, is corruption, is meaningless— then you can never be enslaved!" They let me walk away unharmed. I turned back to watch as the line formed again; the girl wasn't in the queue. *** I woke with a start, from the same old dream. I was lowering my mother into the water from the back of the boat. Her hands were tied, her feet weighted. She was afraid, but she'd put her trust in me. "You'll bring me up safely, won't you, Martin?" I nodded reassuringly. But once she'd vanished beneath the waves, I thought: What am I doing? I

don't believe in this shit any more. So I took out a knife and started cutting through the rope— I brought my knees up to my chest, and crouched on the unfamiliar bed in the darkness. I was in a small town on the railway line, halfway back to Mitar. Halfway between midnight and dawn. I dressed, and made my way out of the hostel. The center of town was deserted, and the sky was thick with stars. Just like home. In Mitar, everything vanished in a fog of light. All three of the stars cited by various authorities as the Earth's sun were above the horizon. If they weren't all mistakes, perhaps I'd live to see a telescope's image of the planet itself. But the prospect of seeking contact with the Angels— if there really was a faction still out there, somewhere— left me cold. I shouted silently up at the stars: Your degenerate offspring don't need your help! Why should we rejoin you? We're going to surpass you! I sat down on the steps at the edge of the square and covered my face. Bravado didn't help. Nothing helped. Maybe if I'd grown up facing the truth, I would have been stronger. But when I woke in the night, knowing that my mother was simply dead, that everyone I'd ever loved would follow her, that I'd vanish into the same emptiness myself, it was like being buried alive. It was like being back in the water, bound and weighted, with the certain knowledge that there was no one to haul me up. Someone put a hand on my shoulder. I looked up, startled. It was a man about my own age. His manner wasn't threatening; if anything, he looked slightly wary of me. He said, "Do you need a roof? I can let you into the Church if you want." There was a trolley packed with cleaning equipment a short distance behind him. I shook my head. "It's not that cold." I was too embarrassed to explain that I had a perfectly good room nearby. "Thanks." As he was walking away, I called after him, "Do you believe in God?" He stopped and stared at me for a while, as if he was trying to decide if this was a trick question— as if I might have been hired by the local parishioners to vet him for theological soundness. Or maybe he just wanted to be diplomatic with anyone desperate enough to be sitting in the town square in the middle of the night, begging a stranger for reassurance. He shook his head. "As a child I did. Not anymore. It was a nice idea ... but it made no sense." He eyed me skeptically, still unsure of my motives. I said, "Then isn't life unbearable?" He laughed. "Not all the time!" He went back to his trolley, and started wheeling it toward the Church. I stayed on the steps, waiting for dawn. Approaching Perimelasma

GEOFFREY A. LANDIS A physicist who works for NASA and who has recently been working on the Martian Lander program, Geoffrey A. Landis is a frequent contributor to Analog and to Asimov's Science Fiction, and has also sold stories to markets such as Interzone, Amazing, and Pulphouse. Landis is not a prolific writer by the high-production standards of the genre, but he is popular. His story "A Walk in the Sun" won him a Nebula and a Hugo Award in 1992, his story "Ripples in the Dirac Sea" won him a Nebula Award in 1990, and his story "Elemental" was on the final Hugo ballot a few years back. His first book was the collection, Myths, Legends, and True History, and he has just sold his first novel, Mars Crossing. His stories have appeared in our Ninth and Fifteenth Annual Collections. He has a Web site at http://www.sff.net/people/Geoffrey.Landis. He lives in Brook Park, Ohio. Here he takes us along on a suspenseful and hair-raising cosmic ride in company with an intrepid future adventurer bound for someplace nobody has ever gone before: a headlong plunge into a black hole, and out of it again— if he can figure a way to get out of it, that is, with all the forces of the universe against him.... There is a sudden frisson of adrenaline, a surge of something approaching terror (if I could still feel terror), and I realize that this is it, this time I am the one who is doing it. I'm the one who is going to drop into a black hole. Oh, my god. This time I'm not you. This is real. Of course, I have experienced this exact feeling before. We both know exactly what it feels like. *** My body seems weird, too big and at once too small. The feel of my muscles, my vision, my kinesthetic sense, everything is wrong. Everything is strange. My vision is fuzzy, and colors are oddly distorted. When I move, my body moves unexpectedly fast. But there seems to be nothing wrong with it. Already I am getting used to it. "It will do," I say. There is too much to know, too much to be all at once. I slowly coalesce the fragments of your personality. None of them are you. All of them are you. A pilot, of course, you must have, you must be, a pilot. I integrate your pilot persona, and he is me. I will fly to the heart of a darkness far darker than any mere unexplored continent. A scientist, somebody to understand your experience, yes. I synthesize a persona. You are him, too, and I understand. And someone to simply experience it, to tell the tale (if any of me will survive to tell the tale) of how you dropped into a black hole, and how you survived. If you survive. Me. I will call myself Wolf, naming myself after a nearby star, for no reason whatsoever, except maybe to claim, if only to myself, that I am not you.

All of we are me are you. But, in a real sense, you're not here at all. None of me are you. You are far away. Safe. *** Some black holes, my scientist persona whispers, are decorated with an accretion disk, shining like a gaudy signal in the sky. Dust and gas from the interstellar medium fall toward the hungry singularity, accelerating to nearly the speed of light in their descent, swirling madly as they fall. It collides; compresses; ionizes. Friction heats the plasma millions of degrees, to emit a brilliant glow of hard X-rays. Such black holes are anything but black; the incandescence of the infalling gas may be the most brilliantly glowing thing in a galaxy. Nobody and nothing would be able to get near it; nothing would be able to survive the radiation. The Virgo hole is not one of these. It is ancient, dating from the very first burst of star-formation when the universe was new, and has long ago swallowed or ejected all the interstellar gas in its region, carving an emptiness far into the interstellar medium around it. The black hole is fifty-seven light years from Earth. Ten billion years ago, it had been a supermassive star, and exploded in a supernova that for a brief moment had shone brighter than the galaxy, in the process tossing away half its mass. Now there is nothing left of the star. The burned-out remnant, some thirty times the mass of the sun, has pulled in space itself around it, leaving nothing behind but gravity. *** Before the download, the psychologist investigated my— your— mental soundness. We must have passed the test, obviously, since I'm here. What type of man would allow himself to fall into a black hole? That is my question. Maybe if I can answer that, I would understand ourself. But this did not seem to interest the psychologist. She did not, in fact, even look directly at me. Her face had the focusless abstract gaze characteristic of somebody hotlinked by the optic nerve to a computer system. Her talk was perfunctory. To be fair, the object of her study was not the flesh me, but my computed reflection, the digital maps of my soul. I remember the last thing she said. "We are fascinated with black holes because of their depth of metaphor," she said, looking nowhere. "A black hole is, literally, the place of no return. We see it as a metaphor for how we, ourselves, are hurled blindly into a place from which no information ever reaches us, the place from which no one ever returns. We live our lives falling into the future, and we will all inevitably meet the singularity." She paused, expecting, no doubt, some comment. But I remained silent. "Just remember this," she said, and for the first time her eyes returned to the outside world and focused on me. "This is a real black hole, not a metaphor. Don't treat it like a metaphor. Expect reality." She paused, and finally added, "Trust the math. It's all we really know, and all that we have to trust." Little help.

*** Wolf versus the black hole! One might think that such a contest is an unequal one, that the black hole has an overwhelming advantage. Not quite so unequal. On my side, I have technology. To start with, the wormhole, the technological sleight-of-space which got you fifty-seven light years from Earth in the first place. The wormhole is a monster of relativity no less than the black hole, a trick of curved space allowed by the theory of general relativity. After the Virgo black hole was discovered, a wormhole mouth was laboriously dragged to it, slower than light, a project that took over a century. Once the wormhole was here, though, the trip became only a short one, barely a meter of travel. Anybody could come here and drop into it. A wormhole— a far too cute name, but one we seem to be stuck with— is a shortcut from one place to another. Physically, it is nothing more than a loop of exotic matter. If you move through the hoop on this side of the wormhole, you emerge out the hoop on that side. Topologically, the two sides of the wormhole are pasted together, a piece cut out of space glued together elsewhere. Exhibiting an excessive sense of caution, the proctors of Earthspace refused to allow the other end of the Virgo wormhole to exit at the usual transportation nexus, the wormhole swarm at Neptune-Trojan 4. The far end of the wormhole opens instead to an orbit around Wolf-562, an undistinguished red dwarf sun circled by two airless planets that are little more than frozen rocks, twenty-one light-years from Earthspace. To get here we had to take a double wormhole hop: Wolf, Virgo. The black hole is a hundred kilometers across. The wormhole is only a few meters across. I would think that they were overly cautious. The first lesson of relativity is that time and space are one. For a long time after the theoretical prediction that such a thing as a traversable wormhole ought to be possible, it was believed that a wormhole could also be made to traverse time as well. It was only much later, when wormhole travel was tested, that it was found that the Cauchy instability makes it impossible to form a wormhole that leads backward in time. The theory was correct— space and time are indeed just aspects of the same reality, spacetime— but any attempt to move a wormhole in such a way that it becomes a timehole produces a vacuum polarization to cancel out the time effect. After we— the spaceship I am to pilot, and myself/yourself— come through the wormhole, the wormhole engineers go to work. I have never seen this process close up, so I stay nearby to watch. This is going to be interesting. A wormhole looks like nothing more than a circular loop of string. It is, in fact, a loop of exotic material, negative-mass cosmic string. The engineers, working telerobotically via vacuum manipulator pods, spray charge onto the string. They charge it until it literally glows with Paschen discharge, like a neon light in the dirty vacuum, and then use the electric charge to manipulate the shape. With the application of invisible electromagnetic fields, the string starts to twist. This is a slow process. Only a few meters across, the wormhole loop has a mass roughly equal to that of Jupiter. Negative to that of Jupiter, to be precise, my scientist persona reminds me, but either way, it is a slow thing to move.

Ponderously, then, it twists further and further, until at last it becomes a lemniscate, a figure of eight. The instant the string touches itself, it shimmers for a moment, and then suddenly there are two glowing circles before us, twisting and oscillating in shape like jellyfish. The engineers spray more charge onto the two wormholes, and the two wormholes, arcing lightning into space, slowly repel each other. The vibrations of the cosmic string are spraying out gravitational radiation like a dog shaking off water— even where I am, floating ten kilometers distant, I can feel it, like the swaying of invisible tides— and as they radiate energy, the loops enlarge. The radiation represents a serious danger. If the engineers lose control of the string for even a brief instant, it might enter the instability known as "squiggle mode," and catastrophically enlarge. The engineers damp out the radiation before it gets critical, though— they are, after all, well practiced at this— and the loops stabilize into two perfect circles. On the other side, at Wolf, precisely the same scene has played out, and two loops of exotic string now circle Wolf-562 as well. The wormhole has been cloned. All wormholes are daughters of the original wormhole, found floating in the depths of interstellar space eleven hundred years ago, a natural loop of negative cosmic string as ancient as the Big Bang, invisible to the eyes save for the distortion of spacetime. That first one led from nowhere interesting to nowhere exciting, but from that one we bred hundreds, and now we casually move wormhole mouths from star to star, breeding new wormholes as it suits us, to form an ever-expanding network of connections. I should not have been so close. Angry red lights have been flashing in my peripheral vision, warning blinkers that I have been ignoring. The energy radiated in the form of gravitational waves had been prodigious, and would have, to a lesser person, been dangerous. But in my new body, I am nearly invulnerable, and if I can't stand a mere wormhole cloning, there is no way I will be able to stand a black hole. So I ignore the warnings, wave briefly to the engineers— though I doubt that they can even see me, floating kilometers away— and use my reaction jets to scoot over to my ship. *** The ship I will pilot is docked to the research station, where the scientists have their instruments and the biological humans have their living quarters. The wormhole station is huge compared to my ship, which is a tiny ovoid occupying a berth almost invisible against the hull. There is no hurry for me to get to it. I'm surprised that any of the technicians can even see me, tiny as I am in the void, but a few of them apparently do, because in my radio I hear casual greetings called out: how's it, ohayo gozaimasu, hey glad you made it, how's the bod? It's hard to tell from the radio voices which ones are people I know, and which are only casual acquaintances. I answer back: how's it, ohayo, yo, surpassing spec. None of them seem inclined to chat, but then, they're busy with their own work. They are dropping things into the black hole. Throwing things in, more to say. The wormhole station orbits a tenth of an astronomical unit from the Virgo black hole, closer to the black hole than Mercury is to the sun. This is an orbit with a period of a little over two days, but, even so close to the black hole, there is nothing to see. A rock, released to fall straight downward, takes almost a day to reach the horizon. One of the scientists supervising, a biological human named Sue, takes the time to talk with me a bit,

explaining what they are measuring. What interests me most is that they are measuring whether the fall deviates from a straight line. This will let them know whether the black hole is rotating. Even a slight rotation would mess up the intricate dance of the trajectory required for my ship. However, the best current theories predict that an old black hole will have shed its angular momentum long ago, and, as far as the technicians can determine, their results show that the conjecture holds. The black hole, or the absence in space where it is located, is utterly invisible from here. I follow the pointing finger of the scientist, but there is nothing to see. Even if I had a telescope, it is unlikely that I would be able to pick out the tiny region of utter blackness against the irregular darkness of an unfamiliar sky. My ship is not so different from the drop probes. The main difference is that I will be on it. Before boarding the station, I jet over in close to inspect my ship, a miniature egg of perfectly reflective material. The hull is made of a single crystal of a synthetic material so strong that no earthly force could even dent it. A black hole, though, is no earthly force. *** Wolf versus the black hole! The second technological trick I have in my duel against the black hole is my body. I am no longer a fragile, fluid-filled biological human. The tidal forces at the horizon of a black hole would rip a true human apart in mere instants; the accelerations required to hover would squash one into liquid. To make this journey, I have downloaded your fragile biological mind into a body of more robust material. As important as the strength of my new body is the fact that it is tiny. The force produced by the curvature of gravity is proportional to the size of the object. My new body, a millimeter tall, is millions of times more resistant to being stretched to spaghetti. The new body has another advantage as well. With my mind operating as software on a computer the size of a pinpoint, my thinking and my reflexes are thousands of times faster than biological. In fact, I have already chosen to slow my thinking down, so that I can still interact with the biologicals. At full speed, my microse-condreactions are lightning compared to the molasses of neuron speeds in biological humans. I see far in the ultraviolet now, a necessary compensation for the fact that my vision would consist of nothing but a blur if I tried to see by visible light. You could have made my body any shape, of course, a tiny cube or even a featureless sphere. But you followed the dictates of social convention. A right human should be recognizably a human, even if I am to be smaller than an ant, and so my body mimics a human body, although no part of it is organic, and my brain faithfully executes your own human brain software. From what I see and feel, externally and internally, I am completely, perfectly human. As is right and proper. What is the value of experience to a machine? Later, after I return— if I return— I can upload back. I can become you.

But return is, as they say, still somewhat problematical. *** You, my original, what do you feel? Why did I think I would do it? I imagine you laughing hysterically about the trick you've played, sending me to drop into the black hole while you sit back in perfect comfort, in no danger. Imagining your laughter comforts me, for all that I know that it is false. I've been in the other place before, and never laughed. I remember the first time I fell into a star. *** We were hotlinked together, that time, united in online-realtime, our separate brains reacting as one brain. I remember what I thought, the incredible electric feel: ohmigod, am I really going to do this? Is it too late to back out? The idea had been nothing more than a whim, a crazy idea, at first. We had been dropping probes into a star, Groombridge 1830B, studying the dynamics of a flare star. We were done, just about, and the last-day-of-project party was just getting in swing. We were all fuzzed with neurotransmitter randomizers, creativity spinning wild and critical thinking nearly zeroed. Somebody, I think it was Jenna, said, we could ride one down, you know. Wait for a flare, and then plunge through the middle of it. Helluva ride! Helluva splash at the end, too, somebody said, and laughed. Sure, somebody said. It might have been me. What do you figure? Download yourself to temp storage and then uplink frames from yourself as you drop? That works, Jenna said. Better: we copy our bodies first, then link the two brains. One body drops; the other copy hotlinks to it. Somehow, I don't remember when, the word "we" had grown to include me. "Sure," I said. "And the copy on top is in null-input suspension; experiences the whole thing realtime!" In the morning, when we were focused again, I might have dismissed the idea as a whim of the fuzz, but for Jenna the decision was already immovable as a droplet of neutronium. Sure we're dropping, let's start now. We made a few changes. It takes a long time to fall into a star, even a small one like Bee, so the copy was reengineered to a slower thought-rate, and the original body in null-input was frame-synched to the drop copy with impulse-echoers. Since the two brains were molecule by molecule identical, the uplink bandwidth required was minimal. The probes were reworked to take a biological, which meant mostly that a cooling system had to be added to hold the interior temperature within the liquidus range of water. We did that by the simplest

method possible: we surrounded the probes with a huge block of cometary ice. As it sublimated, the ionized gas would carry away heat. A secondary advantage of the ice was that our friends, watching from orbit, would have a blazing cometary trail to cheer on. When the ice was used up, of course, the body would slowly vaporize. None of us would actually survive to hit the star. But that was no particular concern. If the experience turned out to be too undesirable, we could always edit the pain part of it out of the memory later. It would have made more sense, perhaps, to have simply recorded the brain-uplink from the copy onto a local high-temp buffer, squirted it back, and linked to it as a memory upload. But Jenna would have none of that. She wanted to experience it in realtime, or at least in as close to realtime as speed-of-light delays allow. Three of us— Jenna, Martha, and me— dropped. Something seems to be missing from my memory here; I can't remember the reason I decided to do it. It must have been something about a biological body, some a-rational consideration that seemed normal to my then-body, that I could never back down from a crazy whim of Jenna's. And I had the same experience, the same feeling then, as I, you, did, always do, the feeling that my god I am the copy and I am going to die. But that time, of course, thinking every thought in synchrony, there was no way at all to tell the copy from the original, to split the me from you. It is, in its way, a glorious feeling. I dropped. You felt it, you remember it. Boring at first, the long drop with nothing but freefall and the chatter of friends over the radio-link. Then the ice shell slowly flaking away, ionizing and beginning to glow, a diaphanous cocoon of pale violet, and below the red star getting larger and larger, the surface mottled and wrinkled, and then suddenly we fell into and through the flare, a huge luminous vault above us, dwarfing our bodies in the immensity of creation. An unguessable distance beneath me, the curvature of the star vanished, and, still falling at three hundred kilometers per second, I was hanging motionless over an infinite plane stretching from horizon to horizon. And then the last of the ice vaporized, and I was suddenly suspended in nothing, hanging nailed to the burning sky over endless crimson horizons of infinity, and pain came like the inevitability of mountains— I didn't edit it— pain like infinite oceans, like continents, like a vast, airless world. Jenna, now I remember. The odd thing is, I never did really connect in any significant way with Jenna. She was already in a quadrad of her own, a quadrad she was fiercely loyal to, one that was solid and accepting to her chameleon character, neither needing nor wanting a fifth for completion. Long after, maybe a century or two later, I found out that Jenna had disassembled herself. After her quadrad split apart, she'd downloaded her character to a mainframe, and then painstakingly cataloged everything that made her Jenna: all her various skills and insights, everything she had experienced, no matter how minor, each facet of her character, every memory and dream and longing: the myriad subroutines of personality. She indexed her soul, and she put the ten thousand pieces of it into the public domain for download. A thousand people, maybe a million people, maybe even more, have pieces of Jenna, her cleverness, her insight, her skill at playing antique instruments.

But nobody has her sense of self. After she copied her subroutines, she deleted herself. *** And who am I? *** Two of the technicians who fit me into my spaceship and who assist in the ten thousand elements of the preflight check are the same friends from that drop, long ago; one of them even still in the same biological body as he had then, although eight hundred years older, his vigor undiminished by biological reconstruction. My survival, if I am to survive, will be dependent on microsecond timing, and I'm embarrassed not to be able to remember his name. He was, I recall, rather stodgy and conservative even back then. We joke and trade small talk as the checkout proceeds. I'm still distracted by my self-questioning, the implications of my growing realization that I have no understanding of why I'm doing this. Exploring a black hole would be no adventure if only we had faster-than-light travel, but of the thousand technological miracles of the third and fourth millennia, this one miracle was never realized. If I had the mythical FTL motor, I could simply drive out of the black hole. At the event horizon, space falls into the black hole at the speed of light; the mythical motor would make that no barrier. But such a motor we do not have. One of the reasons I'm taking the plunge— not the only one, not the main one, but one— is in the hope that scientific measurements of the warped space inside the black hole will elucidate the nature of space and time, and so I myself will make one of the innumerable small steps to bring us closer to an FTL drive. The spaceship I am to pilot has a drive nearly— but not quite— as good. It contains a microscopic twist of spacetime inside an impervious housing, a twist that will parity-reverse ordinary matter into mirror-matter. This total conversion engine gives my ship truly ferocious levels of thrust. The gentlest nudge of my steering rockets will give me thousands of gravities of acceleration. Unthinkable acceleration for a biological body, no matter how well cushioned. The engine will allow the rocket to dare the unthinkable, to hover at the very edge of the event horizon, to maneuver where space itself is accelerating at nearly light-speed. This vehicle, no larger than a peanut, contains the engines of an interstellar probe. Even with such an engine, most of the ship is reaction mass. The preflight checks are all green. I am ready to go. I power up my instruments, check everything out for myself, verify what has already been checked three times, and then check once again. My pilot persona is very thorough. Green. "You still haven't named your ship," comes a voice to me. It is the technician, the one whose name I have forgotten. "What is your call sign?"

One way journey, I think. Maybe something from Dante? No, Sartre said it better: no exit. "Huis Clos," I say, and drop free. Let them look it up. *** Alone. The laws of orbital mechanics have not been suspended, and I do not drop into the black hole. Not yet. With the slightest touch of my steering engines— I do not dare use the main engine this close to the station— I drop into an elliptical orbit, one with a perimelasma closer to, but still well outside, the dangerous zone of the black hole. The black hole is still invisible, but inside my tiny kingdom I have enhanced senses of exquisite sensitivity, spreading across the entire spectrum from radio to gamma radiation. I look with my new eyes to see if I can detect an X-ray glow of interstellar hydrogen being ripped apart, but if there is any such, it is too faint to be visible with even my sensitive instruments. The interstellar medium is so thin here as to be essentially nonexistent. The black hole is invisible. I smile. This makes it better, somehow. The black hole is pure, unsullied by any outside matter. It consists of gravity and nothing else, as close to a pure mathematical abstraction as anything in the universe can ever be. It is not too late to back away. If I were to choose to accelerate at a million gravities, I would reach relativistic velocities in about thirty seconds. No wormholes would be needed for me to run away; I would barely even need to slow down my brain to cruise at nearly the speed of light to anywhere in the colonized galaxy. But I know I won't. The psychologist knew it, too, damn her, or she would never have approved me for the mission. Why? What is it about me? As I worry about this with part of my attention, while the pilot persona flies the ship, I flash onto a realization, and at this realization another memory hits. It is the psychologist, and in the memory I'm attracted to her sexually, so much so that you are distracted from what she is saying. I feel no sexual attraction now, of course. I can barely remember what it is. That part of the memory is odd, alien. "We can't copy the whole brain to the simulation, but we can copy enough that, to yourself, you will still feel like yourself," she said. She is talking to the air, not to you. "You won't notice any gaps." I'm brain-damaged. This is the explanation. You frowned. "How could I not notice that some of my memories are missing?" "The brain makes adjustments. Remember, at any given time, you never even use 1 percent of 1 percent of your memories. What we'll be leaving out will be stuff that you will never have any reason to think about. The memory of the taste of strawberries, for example; the floor-plan of the house you lived in as a teenager. Your first kiss."

This bothered you somewhat— you want to remain yourself. I concentrate, hard. What do strawberries taste like? I can't remember. I'm not even certain what color they are. Round fruits, like apples, I think, only smaller. And the same color as apples, or something similar, I'm sure, except I don't remember what color that is. You decided that you can live with the editing, as long as it doesn't change the essential you. You smiled. "Leave in the first kiss." So I can never possibly solve the riddle: what kind of a man is it that would deliberately allow himself to drop into a black hole. I cannot, because I don't have the memories of you. In a real sense, I am not you at all. But I do remember the kiss. The walk in the darkness, the grass wet with dew, the moon a silver sliver on the horizon, turning to her, and her face already turned up to meet my lips. The taste indescribable, more feeling than taste (not like strawberries at all), the small hardness of her teeth behind the lips— all there. Except the one critical detail: I don't have any idea at all who she was. What else am I missing? Do I even know what I don't know? I was a child, maybe nine, and there was no tree in the neighborhood that you could not climb. I was a careful, meticulous, methodical climber. On the tallest of the trees, when you reached toward the top, you were above the forest canopy (did I live in a forest?) and, out of the dimness of the forest floor, emerged into brilliant sunshine. Nobody else could climb like you; nobody ever suspected how high I climbed. It was your private hiding place, so high that the world was nothing but a sea of green waves in the valley between the mountains. It was my own stupidity, really. At the very limit of the altitude needed to emerge into sunlight, the branches were skinny, narrow as your little finger. They bent alarmingly with your weight, but I knew exactly how much they would take. The bending was a thrill, but I was cautious, and knew exactly what I was doing. It was further down, where the branches were thick and safe, that I got careless. Three points of support, that was the rule of safety, but I was reaching for one branch, not paying attention, when one in my other hand broke, and I was off balance. I slipped. For a prolonged instant I was suspended in space, branches all about me, I reached out and grasped only leaves, and I fell and fell and fell, and all I could think as leaves and branches fell upward past me was, oh my, I made a miscalculation; I was really stupid. The flash memory ends with no conclusion. I must have hit the ground but I cannot remember it. Somebody must have found me, or else I wandered or crawled back, perhaps in a daze, and found somebody, but I cannot remember it. *** Half a million kilometers from the hole. If my elliptical orbit were around the sun instead of a black hole, I would already have penetrated the surface. I now hold the record for the closest human approach. There is still nothing to see with unmagnified senses. It seems surreal that I'm in the grip of something so

powerful that is utterly invisible. With my augmented eyes used as a telescope, I can detect the black hole by what isn't there, a tiny place of blackness nearly indistinguishable from any other patch of darkness except for an odd motion of the stars near it. My ship is sending a continuous stream of telemetry back to the station. I have an urge to add a verbal commentary— there is plenty of bandwidth— but I have nothing to say. There is only one person I have any interest in talking to, and you are cocooned at absolute zero, waiting for me to upload myself and become you. My ellipse takes me inward, moving faster and faster. I am still in Newton's grip, far from the sphere where Einstein takes hold. A tenth of a solar radius. The blackness I orbit is now large enough to see without a telescope, as large as the sun seen from Earth, and swells as I watch with time-distorted senses. Due to its gravity, the blackness in front of the star pattern is a bit larger than the disk of the black hole itself. Square root of twenty-seven over two— about two and a half times larger, the physicist persona notes. I watch in fascination. What I see is a bubble of purest blackness. The bubble pushes the distant stars away from it as it swells. My orbital motion makes the background stars appear to sweep across the sky, and I watch them approach the black hole and then, smoothly pushed by the gravity, move off to the side, a river of stars flowing past an invisible obstacle. It is a gravitational lensing effect, I know, but the view of flowing stars is so spectacular that I cannot help but watch it. The gravity pushes each star to one side or the other. If a star were to pass directly behind the hole, it would appear to split and for an instant become a perfect circle of light, an Einstein ring. But this precise alignment is too rare to see by accident. Closer, I notice an even odder effect. The sweeping stars detour smoothly around the bubble of blackness, but very close to the bubble, there are other stars, stars that actually move in the opposite direction, a counterflowing river of stars. It takes me a long time (microseconds perhaps) before my physicist persona tells me that I am seeing the image of the stars in the Einstein mirror. The entire external universe is mirrored in a narrow ring outside the black hole, and the mirror image flows along with a mirror of my own motion. In the center of the ring there is nothing at all. Five thousand kilometers, and I am moving fast. The gravitational acceleration here is over ten million gees, and I am still fifty times the Schwarzschild radius from the black hole. Einstein's correction is still tiny, though, and if I were to do nothing, my orbit would whip around the black hole and still escape into the outside world. One thousand kilometers. Perimelasma, the closest point of my elliptical orbit. Ten times the Schwarzschild radius, close enough that Einstein's correction to Newton now makes a small difference to the geometry of space. I fire my engines. My speed is so tremendous that it takes over a second of my engine firing at a million gravities to circularize my orbit. My time sense has long since speeded up back to normal, and then faster than normal. I orbit the black hole about ten times per second. My god, this is why I exist, this is why I'm here!

All my doubts are gone in the rush of naked power. No biological could have survived this far; no biological could have even survived the million-gee circularization burn, and I am only at the very beginning! I grin like a maniac, throb with a most unscientific excitement that must be the electronic equivalent of an adrenaline high. Oh, this ship is good. This ship is sweet. A million-gee burn, smooth as magnetic levitation, and I barely cracked the throttle. I should have taken it for a spin before dropping in, should have hot-rodded Huis Clos around the stellar neighborhood. But it had been absolutely out of the question to fire the main engine close to the wormhole station. Even with the incredible efficiency of the engine, that million-gee perimelasma burn must have lit up the research station like an unexpected sun. I can't wait to take Huis Clos in and see what it will really do. My orbital velocity is a quarter of the speed of light. The orbit at nine hundred kilometers is only a parking orbit, a chance for me to configure my equipment, make final measurements, and, in principle, a last chance for me to change my mind. There is nothing to reconnoiter that the probes have not already measured, though, and there is no chance that I will change my mind, however sensible that may seem. The river of stars swirls in a dance of counterflow around the blackness below me. The horizon awaits. The horizon below is invisible, but real. There is no barrier at the horizon, nothing to see, nothing to feel. I will even be unable to detect it, except for my calculations. An event horizon is a one-way membrane, a place you can pass into but neither you nor your radio signals can pass out of. According to the mathematics, as I pass through the event horizon, the directions of space and time change identity. Space rotates into time; time rotates into space. What this means is that the direction to the center of the black hole, after I pass the event horizon, will be the future. The direction out of the black hole will be the past. This is the reason that no one and nothing can ever leave a black hole; the way inward is the one direction we always must go, whether we will it or not: into the future. Or so the mathematics says. The future, inside a black hole, is a very short one. So far the mathematics has been right on. Nevertheless, I go on. With infinitesimal blasts from my engine, I inch my orbit lower. The bubble of blackness gets larger, and the counterflow of stars around it becomes more complex. As I approach three times the Schwarzschild radius, 180 kilometers, I check all my systems. This is the point of no rescue: inside three Schwarzschild radii, no orbits are stable, and my automatic systems will be constantly thrusting to adjust my orbital parameters to keep me from falling into the black hole or being flung away to infinity. My systems are all functional, in perfect form for the dangerous drop. My orbital velocity is already half the speed of light. Below this point, centrifugal force will decrease toward zero as I lower my orbit, and I must use my thrusters to increase my velocity as I descend, or else plunge into the hole. When I grew up, in the last years of the second millennium, nobody thought that they would live forever.

Nobody would have believed me if I told them that by my thousandth birthday, I would have no concept of truly dying. Even if all our clever tricks fail, even if I plunge through the event horizon and am stretched into spaghetti and crushed by the singularity, I will not die. You, my original, will live on, and if you were to die, we have made dozens of back-ups and spin-off copies of myselves in the past, some versions of which must surely still be living on. My individual life has little importance. I can, if I chose, uplink my brain-state to the orbiting station right at this instant, and reawake, whole, continuing this exact thought, unaware (except on an abstract intellectual level) that I and you are not the same. But we are not the same, you and I. I am an edited-down version of you, and the memories that have been edited out, even if I never happen to think them, make me different, a new individual. Not you. On a metaphorical level, a black hole stands for death, the blackness that is sucking us all in. But what meaning does death have in a world of matrix back-ups and modular personality? Is my plunge a death wish? Is it thumbing my nose at death? Because I intend to survive. Not you. Me. I orbit the black hole over a hundred times a second now, but I have revved my brain processing speed accordingly, so that my orbit seems to me leisurely enough. The view here is odd. The black hole has swollen to the size of a small world below me, a world of perfect velvet darkness, surrounded by a belt of madly rotating stars. No engine, no matter how energetic, can put a ship into an orbit at 1.5 times the Schwarzschild radius; at this distance, the orbital velocity is the speed of light, and not even my total-conversion engine can accelerate me to that speed. Below that, there are no orbits at all. I stop my descent at an orbit just sixty kilometers from the event horizon, when my orbital velocity reaches 85 percent of the speed of light. Here I can coast, ignoring the constant small adjustments of the thrusters that keep my orbit from sliding off the knife-edge. The velvet blackness of the black hole is almost half of the universe now, and if I were to trust the outside view, I am diving at a slant downward into the black hole. I ignore my pilot's urge to override the automated navigation and manually even out the trajectory. The downward slant is only relativistic aberration, nothing more, an illusion of my velocity. And 85 percent of the speed of light is as fast as I dare orbit; I must conserve my fuel for the difficult part of the plunge to come. In my unsteady orbit sixty kilometers above the black hole, I let my ship's computer chat with the computer of the wormhole station, updating and down-loading my sensors' observations. At this point, according to the mission plan, I am supposed to uplink my brain state, so that should anything go wrong further down the well, you, my original, will be able to download my state and experiences to this point. To hell with that, I think, a tiny bit of rebellion. I am not you. If you awaken with my memories, I will be no less dead. Nobody at the wormhole station questions my decision not to upload. I remember one other thing now. "You're a type N personality," the psychologist had said, twitching her thumb to leaf through invisible pages of test results. The gesture marked her era; only a person who had grown up before computer hotlinks would move a physical muscle in commanding a virtual. She was twenty-first century, possibly even twentieth. "But I suppose you already know that."

"Type N?" you asked. "Novelty-seeking," she said. "Most particularly, one not prone to panic at new situations." "Oh," you said. You did already know that. "Speaking of novelty seeking, how do you feel about going to bed with a type N personality?" "That would be unprofessional." She frowned. "I think." "Not even one who is about to jump down a black hole?" She terminated the computer link with a flick of her wrist, and turned to look at you. "Well—" *** From this point onward, microsecond timing is necessary for the dance we have planned to succeed. My computer and the station computer meticulously compare clocks, measuring Doppler shifts to exquisite precision. My clocks are running slow, as expected, but half of the slowness is relativistic time dilation due to my velocity. The gravitational redshift is still modest. After some milliseconds— a long wait for me, in my hyped-up state— they declare that they agree. The station has already done their part, and I begin the next phase of my descent. The first thing I do is fire my engine to stop my orbit. I crack the throttle to fifty million gees of acceleration, and the burn takes nearly a second, a veritable eternity, to slow my flight. For a moment I hover, and start to drop. I dare not drop too fast, and I ramp my throttle up, to a hundred megagee, five hundred, a billion gravities. At forty billion gravities of acceleration, my engine thrust equals the gravity of the black hole, and I hover. The blackness has now swallowed half of the universe. Everything beneath me is black. Between the black below and the starry sky above, a spectacularly bright line exactly bisects the sky. I have reached the altitude at which orbital velocity is just equal to the speed of light, and the light from my rocket exhaust is in orbit around the black hole. The line I see around the sky is my view of my own rocket, seen by light that has traveled all the way around the black hole. All I can see is the exhaust, far brighter than anything else in the sky. The second brightest thing is the laser beacon from the wormhole station above me, shifted from the original red laser color to a greenish blue. The laser marks the exact line between the station and the black hole, and I maneuver carefully until I am directly beneath the orbiting station. At forty billion gravities, even my ultrastrong body is at its limits. I cannot move, and even my smallest finger is pressed against the form-fitting acceleration couch. But the controls, hardware-interfaced to my brain, do not require me to lift a finger to command the spacecraft. The command I give Huis Clos is: down. My engine throttles down slightly, and I drop inward from the photon sphere, the bright line of my exhaust vanishes. Every stray photon from my drive is now sucked downward.

Now my view of the universe has changed. The black hole has become the universe around me, and the universe itself, all the galaxies and stars and the wormhole station, is a shrinking sphere of sparkling dust above me. Sixty billion gravities. Seventy. Eighty. Eighty billion gravities is full throttle. I am burning fuel at an incredible rate, and only barely hold steady. I am still twenty kilometers above the horizon. There is an unbreakable law of physics: incredible accelerations require incredible fuel consumption. Even though my spaceship is, by mass, comprised mostly of fuel, I can maintain less than a millisecond worth of thrust at this acceleration. I cut my engine and drop. It will not be long now. This is my last chance to uplink a copy of my mind back to the wormhole station to wake in your body, with my last memory the decision to upload my mind. I do not. The stars are blueshifted by a factor of two, which does not make them noticeably bluer. Now that I have stopped accelerating, the starlight is falling into the hole along with me, and the stars do not blueshift any further. My instruments probe the vacuum around me. The theorists say that the vacuum close to the horizon of a black hole is an exotic vacuum, abristle with secret energy. Only a ship plunging through the event horizon would be able to measure this. I do, recording the results carefully on my ship's on-board recorders, since it is now far too late to send anything back by radio. There is no sign to mark the event horizon, and there is no indication at all when I cross it. If it were not for my computer, there would be no way for me to tell that I have passed the point of no return. Nothing is different. I look around the tiny cabin, and can see no change. The blackness below me continues to grow, but is otherwise not changed. The outside universe continues to shrink above me; the brightness beginning to concentrate into a belt around the edge of the glowing sphere of stars, but this is only an effect of my motion. The only difference is that I have only a few hundred microseconds left. From the viewpoint of the outside world, the light from my spacecraft has slowed down and stopped at the horizon. But I have far outstripped my lagging image, and am falling toward the center at incredible speed. At the exact center is the singularity, far smaller than an atom, a mathematical point of infinite gravity and infinite mystery. Whoever I am, whether or not I survive, I am now the first person to penetrate the event horizon of a black hole. That's worth a cheer, even with nobody to hear. Now I have to count on the hope that the microsecond timing of the technicians above me had been perfect for the second part of my intricate dance, the part that might, if all goes well, allow me to survive. Above me, according to theory, the stars have already burned out, and even the most miserly red dwarf has sputtered the last of its hydrogen fuel and grown cold. The universe has already ended, and the stars have gone out. I still see a steady glow of starlight from the universe above me, but this is fossil light, light that has been falling down into the black hole with me for eons, trapped in the infinitely stretched time of the black hole. For me, time has rotated into space, and space into time. Nothing feels different to me, but I cannot

avoid the singularity at the center of the black hole any more than I can avoid the future. Unless, that is, I have a trick. Of course, I have a trick. At the center of the spherical universe above me is a dot of bright blue-violet; the fossil light of the laser beacon from the orbiting station. My reaction jets have kept on adjusting my trajectory to keep me centered in the guidance beam, so I am directly below the station. Anything dropped from the station will, if everything works right, drop directly on the path I follow. I am approaching close to the center now, and the tidal forces stretching my body are creeping swiftly toward a billion gees per millimeter. Much higher, and even my tremendously strong body will be ripped to spaghetti. There are only microseconds left for me. It is time. I hammer my engine, full throttle. Far away, and long ago, my friends at the wormhole station above dropped a wormhole into the event horizon. If their timing was perfect— From a universe that has already died, the wormhole cometh. Even with my enhanced time sense, things happen fast. The laser beacon blinks out, and the wormhole sweeps down around me like the vengeance of God, far faster than I can react. The sparkle-filled sphere of the universe blinks out like a light, and the black hole— and the tidal forces stretching my body— abruptly disappears. For a single instant I see a black disk below me, and then the wormhole rotates, twists, stretches, and then silently vanishes. Ripped apart by the black hole. My ship is vibrating like a bell from the abrupt release of tidal stretching. "I did it," I shout. "It worked! God damn it, it really worked!" This was what was predicted by the theorists, that I would be able to pass through the wormhole before it was shredded by the singularity at the center. The other possibility, that the singularity itself, infinitesimally small and infinitely powerful, might follow me through the wormhole, was laughed at by everyone who had any claim to understand wormhole physics. This time, the theorists were right. But where am I? There should be congratulations pouring into my radio by now, teams of friends and technicians swarming over to greet me, cheering and shouting. "Huis Clos," I say, over the radio. "I made it! Huis Clos here. Is anybody there?" In theory, I should have reemerged at Wolf-562. But I do not see it. In fact, what I see is not recognizably the universe at all. There are no stars. Instead of stars, the sky is filled with lines, parallel lines of white light by the uncountable thousands. Dominating the sky, where the star Wolf-562 should have been, is a glowing red cylinder, perfectly straight, stretching to infinity in both directions.

Have I been transported into some other universe? Could the black hole's gravity sever the wormhole, cutting it loose from our universe entirely, and connect it into this strange new one? If so, it has doomed me. The wormhole behind me, my only exit from this strange universe, is already destroyed. Not that escaping through it could have done me any good— it would only have brought me back to the place I escaped, to be crushed by the singularity of the black hole. I could just turn my brain off, and I will have lost nothing, in a sense. They will bring you out of your suspended state, tell you that the edition of you that dropped into the black hole failed to upload, and they lost contact after it passed the event horizon. The experiment failed, but you had never been in danger. But, however much you think we are the same, I am not you. I am a unique individual. When they revive you, without your expected new memories, I will still be gone. I want to survive, I want to return. A universe of tubes of light! Brilliant bars of an infinite cage. The bright lines in the sky have slight variations in color, from pale red to plasma-arc blue. They must be similar to the red cylinder near me, I figure, but light-years away. How could a universe have lines of light instead of stars? I am amazingly well equipped to investigate that question, with senses that range from radio through X-ray, and I have nothing else to do for the next thousand years or so. So I take a spectrum of the light from the glowing red cylinder. I have no expectation that the spectrum will reveal anything I can interpret, but oddly, it looks normal. Impossibly, it looks like the spectrum of a star. The computer can even identify, from its data of millions of spectra, precisely which star. The light from the cylinder has the spectral signature of Wolf-562. Coincidence? It cannot possibly be coincidence, out of billions of possible spectra, that this glowing sword in the sky has exactly the spectrum of the star that should have been there. There can be no other conclusion but that the cylinder is Wolf-562. I take a few more spectra, this time picking at random three of the lines of light in the sky, and the computer analyzes them for me. A bright one: the spectrum of 61 Virginis. A dimmer one: a match to Wolf-1061. A blue-white streak: Vega. The lines in the sky are stars. What does this mean? I'm not in another universe. I am in our universe, but the universe has been transformed. Could the collision of a wormhole with a black hole destroy our entire universe, stretching suns like taffy into infinite straight lines? Impossible. Even if it had, I would still see far-away stars as dots, since the light from them has been traveling for hundreds of years. The universe cannot have changed. Therefore, by logic, it must be me who has been transformed.

Having figured out this much, the only possible answer is obvious. When the mathematicians describe the passage across the event horizon of a black hole, they say that the space and time directions switch identity. I had always thought this only a mathematical oddity, but if it were true, if I had rotated when I passed the event horizon, and was now perceiving time as a direction in space, and one of the space axes as time— this would explain everything. Stars extend from billions of years into the past to long into the future; perceiving time as space, I see lines of light. If I were to come closer and find one of the rocky planets of Wolf-562, it would look like a braid around the star, a helix of solid rock. Could I land on it? How would I interact with a world where what I perceive as time is a direction in space? My physicist persona doesn't like this explanation, but is at a loss to find a better one. In this strange sideways existence, I must be violating the conservation laws of physics like mad, but the persona could find no other hypothesis and must reluctantly agree: time is rotated into space. To anybody outside, I must look like a string, a knobby long rope with one end at the wormhole and the other at my death, wherever that might be. But nobody could see me fast enough, since with no extension in time I must only be a transient event that bursts everywhere into existence and vanishes at the same instant. There is no way I can signal, no way I can communicate— Or? Time, to me, is now a direction I can travel in as simply as using my rocket. I could find a planet, travel parallel to the direction of the surface— But, no, all I could do would be to appear to the inhabitants briefly as a disk, a cross-section of myself, infinitely thin. There is no way I could communicate. But I can travel in time, if I want. Is there any way I can use this? Wait. If I have rotated from space into time, then there is one direction in space that I cannot travel. Which direction is that? The direction that used to be away from the black hole. Interesting thoughts, but not ones which help me much. To return, I need to once again flip space and time. I could dive into a black hole. This would again rotate space and time, but it wouldn't do me any good: once I left the black hole— if I could leave the black hole— nothing would change. Unless there were a wormhole inside the black hole, falling inward to destruction just at the same instant I was there? But the only wormhole that has fallen into a black hole was already destroyed. Unless, could I travel forward in time? Surely some day the research team would drop a new wormhole into the black hole— Idiot. Of course there's a solution. Time is a spacelike dimension to me, so I can travel either direction in time now, forward or back. I need only to move back to an instant just after the wormhole passed through the event horizon, and, applying full thrust, shoot through. The very moment that my original self shoots through the wormhole to escape the singularity, I can pass through the opposite direction, and rotate myself back into the real universe. The station at Virgo black hole is forty light years away, and I don't dare use the original wormhole to reach it. My spacetime-rotated body must be an elongated snake in this version of space-time, and I do not wish to find out what a wormhole passage will do to it until I have no other choice. Still, that is no

problem for me. Even with barely enough fuel to thrust for a few microseconds, I can reach an appreciable fraction of light-speed, and I can slow down my brain to make the trip appear only an instant. To an outside observer, it takes literally no time at all. *** "No," says the psych tech, when I ask her. "There's no law that compels you to uplink back into your original. You're a free human being. Your original can't force you." "Great," I say. Soon I'm going to have to arrange to get a biological body built for myself. This one is superb, but it's a disadvantage in social intercourse being only a millimeter tall. The transition back to real space worked perfectly. Once I figured out how to navigate in time-rotated space, it had been easy enough to find the wormhole and the exact instant it had penetrated the event horizon. "Are you going to link your experiences to public domain?" the tech asks. "I think he would like to see what you experienced. Musta been pretty incredible." "Maybe," I said. "For that matter," the psych tech added, "I'd like to link it, too." "I'll think about it." So I am a real human being now, independent of you, my original. There had been cheers and celebrations when I had emerged from the wormhole, but nobody had an inkling quite how strange my trip had been until I told them. Even then, I doubt that I was quite believed until the sensor readings and computer logs of Huis Clos confirmed my story with hard data. The physicists had been ecstatic. A new tool to probe time and space. The ability to rotate space into time will open up incredible capabilities. They were already planning new expeditions, not the least of which was a trip to probe right to the singularity itself. They had been duly impressed with my solution to the problem, although, after an hour of thinking it over, they all agreed it had been quite obvious. "It was lucky," one of them remarked, "that you decided to go through the wormhole from the opposite side, that second time." "Why?" I asked. "If you'd gone through the same direction, you'd have rotated an additional ninety degrees, instead of going back." "So?"

"Reversed the time vector. Turns you into antimatter. First touch of the interstellar medium— Poof." "Oh," I said. I hadn't thought of that. It made me feel a little less clever. Now that the mission is over, I have no purpose, no direction for my existence. The future is empty, the black hole that we all must travel into. I will get a biological body, yes, and embark on the process of finding out who I am. Maybe, I think, this is a task that everybody has to do. And then I will meet you. With luck, perhaps I'll even like you. And maybe, if I should like you enough, and I feel confident, I'll decide to upload you into myself, and once more, we will again be one. Craphound CORY DOCTOROW Here's a wry, quirky, nostalgic, and oddly lyrical reexamination of an old question— what do the vintners buy one-half so precious as the stuff they sell? New writer Cory Doctorow has sold fiction to Science Fiction Age, Asimov's Science Fiction, Amazing, Northern Suns, On Spec, Air Fish, and Tesseracts[7], and nonfiction pieces to Wired and Sci-Fi Entertainment. He also contributes a regular column about interesting stuff to find on the Internet to Science Fiction Age. He has a Web site at http:// www.craphound.com. He lives in Toronto, Canada. Craphound had wicked yard-sale karma, for a rotten, filthy, alien bastard. He was too good at panning out the single grain of gold in a raging river of uselessness for me not to like him— respect him, anyway. But then he found the cowboy trunk. It was two months' rent to me and nothing but some squirrely alien kitschfetish to Craphound. So I did the unthinkable. I violated the Code. I got into a bidding war with a buddy. Never let them tell you that women poison friendships: In my experience, wounds from women-fights heal quickly; fights with men over garbage leave nothing behind but scorched earth. Craphound spotted the sign— his karma, plus the goggles in his exoskeleton, gave him the advantage when we were doing 80 kmh on some stretch of back-highway in cottage country. He was riding shotgun while I drove, and we had the radio tuned to the summer-Saturday programming: eight weekends with eight hours of old radio dramas: The Shadow, Quiet Please, Tom Mix, The Crypt-Keeper with Bela Lugosi. It was hour three, and Bogey was phoning in his performance on a radio adaptation of The African Queen. I had the windows of the old truck rolled down so that I could smoke without fouling Craphound's breather. My arm was hanging out the window, the radio was booming, and Craphound said "Turn around! Turn around, now, Jerry, now, turn around!" When Craphound gets that excited, it's a sign that he's spotted a rich vein. I checked the side-mirror quickly, pounded the brakes, and spun around. The transmission creaked, the wheels squealed, and then we were creeping along the way we'd come. "There," Craphound said, gesturing with his long, skinny arm. I saw it. A wooden A-frame real-estate

sign, a piece of hand-lettered cardboard stuck overtop of the realtor's name: EAST MUSKOKA VOLUNTEER FIRE DEPT LADIES AUXILIARY RUMMAGE SALE SAT 25 JUNE "Hoo-eee!" I hollered, and spun the truck onto the dirt road. I gunned the engine as we cruised along the tree-lined road, trusting Craphound to spot any deer, signs, or hikers in time to avert disaster. The sky was a perfect blue and the smells of summer were all around. I snapped off the radio and listened to the wind rushing through the truck. Ontario is beautiful in the summer. "There!" Craphound shouted. I hit the turn-off and down-shifted and then we were back on a paved road. Soon, we were rolling into a country fire station, an ugly brick barn. The hall was lined with long folding tables, stacked high. The mother lode! Craphound beat me out the door, as usual. His exoskeleton is programmable, so he can record little scripts for it like: move left arm to door handle, pop it, swing legs out to running-board, jump to ground, close door, move forward. Meanwhile, I'm still making sure I've switched off the headlights and that I've got my wallet. *** Two blue-haired grannies had a card table set up in front of the hall, with a big tin pitcher of lemonade and three boxes of Tim Horton assorted donuts. That stopped us both, since we share the superstition that you always buy food from old ladies and little kids, as a sacrifice to the crap-gods. One of the old ladies poured out the lemonade while the other smiled and greeted us. "Welcome, welcome! My, you've come a long way for us!" "Just up from Toronto, ma'am," I said. It's an old joke, but it's also part of the ritual, and it's got to be done. "I meant your friend, sir. This gentleman." Craphound smiled without baring his gums and sipped his lemonade. "Of course I came, dear lady. I wouldn't miss it for the worlds!" His accent is pretty good, but when it comes to stock phrases like this, he's got so much polish you'd think he was reading the news. The biddie blushed and giggled, and I felt faintly sick. I walked off to the tables, trying not to hurry. I chose my first spot, about halfway down, where things wouldn't be quite so picked over. I grabbed an empty box from underneath and started putting stuff into it: four matched highball glasses with gold crossed bowling-pins and a line of black around the rim; an Expo '67 wall-hanging that wasn't even a little faded; a shoebox full of late '60s O-Pee-Chee hockey cards; a worn, wooden-handled steel cleaver that you could butcher a steer with. I picked up my box and moved on: a deck of playing cards copyrighted '57, with the logo of the Royal Canadian Dairy, Bala Ontario printed on the backs; a fireman's cap with a brass badge so tarnished I

couldn't read it; a three-story wedding-cake trophy for the 1974 Eastern Region Curling Championships. The cash-register in my mind was ringing, ringing, ringing. God bless the East Muskoka Volunteer Fire Department Ladies' Auxiliary. I'd mined that table long enough. I moved to the other end of the hall. Time was, I'd start at the beginning and turn over each item, build one pile of maybes and another pile of definites, try to strategize. In time, I came to rely on instinct and on the fates, to whom I make my obeisances at every opportunity. Let's hear it for the fates: a genuine collapsible tophat; a white-tipped evening cane; a hand-carved cherry-wood walking stick; a beautiful black lace parasol; a wrought-iron lightning rod with a rooster on top; all of it in an elephant-leg umbrella-stand. I filled the box, folded it over, and started on another. I collided with Craphound. He grinned his natural grin, the one that showed row on row of wet, slimy gums, tipped with writhing, poisonous suckers. "Gold! Gold!" he said, and moved along. I turned my head after him, just as he bent over the cowboy trunk. I sucked air between my teeth. It was magnificent: a leather-bound miniature steamer trunk, the leather worked with lariats, Stetson hats, war-bonnets, and six-guns. I moved toward him, and he popped the latch. I caught my breath. On top, there was a kid's cowboy costume: miniature leather chaps; a tiny Stetson; a pair of scuffed white leather cowboy boots with long, worn spurs affixed to the heels. Craphound moved it reverently to the table and continued to pull more magic from the trunk's depths: a stack of cardboard-bound Hopalong Cassidy 78s; a pair of tin six-guns with gunbelt and holsters; a silver star that said Sheriff; a bundle of Roy Rogers comics tied with twine, in mint condition; and a leather satchel filled with plastic cowboys and Indians, enough to reenact the Alamo. "Oh, my God," I breathed, as he spread the loot out on the table. "What are these, Jerry?" Craphound asked, holding up the 78s. "Old records, like LPs, but you need a special record player to listen to them." I took one out of its sleeve. It gleamed, scratch-free, in the overhead fluorescents. "I got a 78 player here," said a member of the East Muskoka Volunteer Fire Department Ladies' Auxiliary. She was short enough to look Craphound in the eye, a hair under five feet, and had a skinny, rawboned look to her. "That's my Billy's things, 'Billy the Kid' we called him. He was dotty for cowboys when he was a boy. Couldn't get him to take off that fool outfit— nearly got him thrown out of school. He's a lawyer now, in Toronto, got a fancy office on Bay Street. I called him to ask if he minded my putting his cowboy things in the sale, and you know what? He didn't know what I was talking about! Doesn't that beat everything? He was dotty for cowboys when he was a boy." It's another of my rituals to smile and nod and be as polite as possible to the erstwhile owners of crap that I'm trying to buy, so I smiled and nodded and examined the 78 player she had produced. In lariat script, on the top, it said, "Official Bob Wills Little Record Player," and had a crude watercolor of Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys grinning on the front. It was the kind of record player that folded up like a suitcase when you weren't using it. I'd had one as a kid, with Yogi Bear silkscreened on the front. Billy's mom plugged the yellowed cord into a wall jack and took the 78 from me, touched the stylus to the record. A tinny ukelele played, accompanied by horse-clops, and then a narrator with a deep, whisky

voice said, "Howdy, Pardners! I was just settin' down by the ole campfire. Why don't you stay an' have some beans, an' I'll tell y'all the story of how Hopalong Cassidy beat the Duke Gang when they come to rob the Santa Fe." In my head, I was already breaking down the cowboy trunk and its contents, thinking about the minimum bid I'd place on each item at Sotheby's. Sold individually, I figured I could get over two grand for the contents. Then I thought about putting ads in some of the Japanese collectors' magazines, just for a lark, before I sent the lot to the auction house. You never can tell. A buddy I knew had sold a complete packaged set of Welcome Back, Kotter action figures for nearly eight grand that way. Maybe I could buy a new truck.... "This is wonderful," Craphound said, interrupting my reverie. "How much would you like for the collection?" I felt a knife in my guts. Craphound had found the cowboy trunk, so that meant it was his. But he usually let me take the stuff with street-value— he was interested in everything, so it hardly mattered if I picked up a few scraps with which to eke out a living. Billy's mom looked over the stuff. "I was hoping to get twenty dollars for the lot, but if that's too much, I'm willing to come down." "I'll give you thirty," my mouth said, without intervention from my brain. They both turned and stared at me. Craphound was unreadable behind his goggles. Billy's mom broke the silence. "Oh, my! Thirty dollars for this old mess?" "I will pay fifty," Craphound said. "Seventy-five," I said. "Oh, my," Billy's mom said. "Five hundred," Craphound said. I opened my mouth, and shut it. Craphound had built his stake on Earth by selling a complicated biochemical process for nonchlorophyll photosynthesis to a Saudi banker. I wouldn't ever beat him in a bidding war: "A thousand dollars," my mouth said. "Ten thousand," Craphound said, and extruded a roll of hundreds from somewhere in his exoskeleton. "My Lord!" Billy's mom said. "Ten thousand dollars!" The other pickers, the firemen, the blue-haired ladies, all looked up at that and stared at us, their mouths open. "It is for a good cause," Craphound said. "Ten thousand dollars!" Billy's mom said again.

Craphound's digits ruffled through the roll as fast as a croupier's counter, separated off a large chunk of the brown bills, and handed them to Billy's mom. One of the firemen, a middle-aged paunchy man with a comb-over, appeared at Billy's mom's shoulder. "What's going on, Eva?" he said. "This ... gentleman is going to pay ten thousand dollars for Billy's old cowboy things, Tom." The fireman took the money from Billy's mom and stared at it. He held up the top note under the light and turned it this way and that, watching the holographic stamp change from green to gold, then green again. He looked at the serial number, then the serial number of the next bill. He licked his forefinger and started counting off the bills in piles of ten. Once he had ten piles, he counted them again. "That's ten thousand dollars, all right. Thank you very much, mister. Can I give you a hand getting this to your car?" Craphound, meanwhile, had repacked the trunk and balanced the 78 player on top of it. He looked at me, then at the fireman. "I wonder if I could impose on you to take me to the nearest bus station. I think I'm going to be making my own way home." The fireman and Billy's mom both stared at me. My cheeks flushed. "Aw, c'mon," I said. "I'll drive you home." "I think I prefer the bus," Craphound said. "It's no trouble at all to give you a lift, friend," the fireman said. I called it quits for the day, and drove home alone with the truck only half-filled. I pulled into the coach-house and threw a tarp over the load and went inside and cracked a beer and sat on the sofa, watching a nature show on a desert reclamation project in Arizona, where the state legislature had traded a derelict mega-mall and a custom-built habitat to an alien for a local-area weather-control machine. *** The following Thursday, I went to the little crapauction house on King Street. I'd put my finds from the weekend in the sale: lower minimum bid, and they took a smaller commission than Sotheby's. Fine for moving the small stuff. Craphound was there, of course. I knew he'd be. It was where we met, when he bid on a case of Lincoln Logs I'd found at a fire-sale. I'd known him for a kindred spirit when he bought them, and we'd talked afterward, at his place, a sprawling, two-story warehouse amid a cluster of autowrecking yards where the junkyard dogs barked, barked, barked. Inside was paradise. His taste ran to shrines— a collection of '50s bar kitsch that was a shrine to liquor, a circular waterbed on a raised podium that was nearly buried under '70s bachelor pad-inalia; a kitchen

that was nearly unusable, so packed it was with old barnboard furniture and rural memorabilia; a leather-appointed library straight out of a Victorian gentlemen's club; a solarium dressed in wicker and bamboo and tiki-idols. It was a hell of a place. Craphound had known all about the Goodwills and the Sally Anns, and the auction houses, and the kitsch boutiques on Queen Street, but he still hadn't figured out where it all came from. "Yard sales, rummage sales, garage sales," I said, reclining in a vibrating Naugahyde easy chair, drinking a glass of his pricey single-malt that he'd bought for the beautiful bottle it came in. "But where are these? Who is allowed to have them?" Craphound hunched opposite me, his exoskeleton locked into a coiled, semiseated position. "Who? Well, anyone. You just one day decide that you need to clean out the basement, you put an ad in the Star, tape up a few signs, and voila— yard sale. Sometimes, a school or a church will get donations of old junk and sell it all at one time, as a fundraiser." "And how do you locate these?" he asked, bobbing up and down slightly with excitement. "Well, there're amateurs who just read the ads in the weekend papers, or just pick a neighborhood and wander around, but that's no way to go about it. What I do is, I get in a truck, and I sniff the air, catch the scent of crap, and vroom!— I'm off like a bloodhound on a trail. You learn things over time: like stay away from Yuppie yard sales; they never have anything worth buying, just the same crap you can buy in any mall." "Do you think I might accompany you some day?" "Hell, sure. Next Saturday? We'll head over to Cabbagetown— those old coach houses, you'd be amazed what people get rid of. It's practically criminal." "I would like to go with you next Saturday very much Mr. Jerry Abington." He used to talk like that, without commas or question marks. Later, he got better, but then, it was all one big sentence. "Call me Jerry. It's a date, then. Tell you what, though: there's a Code you got to learn before we go out. The Craphound's Code." "What is a craphound?" "You're lookin' at one. You're one, too, unless I miss my guess. You'll get to know some of the local craphounds, you hang around with me long enough. They're the competition, but they're also your buddies, and there're certain rules we have." And then I explained to him all about how you never bid against a craphound at a yard sale, how you get to know the other fellows' tastes, and when you see something they might like you haul it out for them, and they'll do the same for you, and how you never buy something that another craphound might be looking for, if all you're buying it for is to sell it back to him. Just good form and common sense, really, but you'd be surprised how many amateurs just fail to make the jump to pro because they can't grasp it. ***

There was a bunch of other stuff at the auction, other craphounds' weekend treasures. This was high season, when the sun comes out and people start to clean out the cottage, the basement, the garage. There were some collectors in the crowd, and a whole whack of antique and junk dealers, and a few pickers, and me, and Craphound. I watched the bidding listlessly, waiting for my things to come up and sneaking out for smokes between lots. Craphound never once looked at me or acknowledged my presence, and I became perversely obsessed with catching his eye, so I coughed and shifted and walked past him several times, until the auctioneer glared at me, and one of the attendants asked if I needed a throat lozenge. My lot came up. The bowling glasses went for five bucks to one of the Queen Street junk dealers; the elephant-foot fetched $350 after a spirited bidding war between an antique dealer and a collector— the collector won; the dealer took the tophat for $100. The rest of it came up and sold, or didn't, and at the end of the lot I'd made $800, which was rent for the month plus beer for the weekend plus gas for the truck. Craphound bid on and bought more cowboy things— a box of Super 8 cowboy movies, the boxes moldy, the stock itself running to slime; a Navajo blanket; a plastic donkey that dispensed cigarettes out of its ass; a big neon armadillo sign. One of the other nice things about that place over Sotheby's, there was none of this waiting thirty days to get a check. I waited in line with the other pickers after the bidding was through, collected a wad of bills, and headed for my truck. I spotted Craphound loading his haul into a minivan with handicapped plates. It looked like some kind of fungus was growing over the hood and side-panels. On closer inspection, I saw that the body had been covered in closely glued Legos. Craphound popped the hatchback and threw his gear in, then opened the driver's side door, and I saw that his van had been fitted out for a legless driver, with brake and accelerator levers. A paraplegic I knew drove one just like it. Craphound's exoskeleton levered him into the seat, and I watched the eerily precise way it executed the macro that started the car, pulled the shoulder-belt, put it into drive, and switched on the stereo. I heard tape-hiss, then, loud as a b-boy cruising Yonge Street, an old-timey cowboy voice: "Howdy pardners! Saddle up, we're ridin'!" Then the van backed up and sped out of the lot. I got into the truck and drove home. Truth be told, I missed the little bastard. *** Some people said that we should have run Craphound and his kin off the planet, out of the Solar System. They said that it wasn't fair for the aliens to keep us in the dark about their technologies. They say that we should have captured a ship and reverse-engineered it, built our own and kicked ass. Some people! First of all, nobody with human DNA could survive a trip in one of those ships. They're part of Craphound's people's bodies, as I understand it, and we just don't have the right parts. Second of all,

they were sharing their tech with us— they just weren't giving it away. Fair trades every time. It's not as if space was off-limits to us. We can, any one of us, visit their homeworld, just as soon as we figure out how. Only they wouldn't hold our hands along the way. *** I spent the week haunting the "Secret Boutique," AKA the Goodwill As-Is Center on Jarvis. It's all there is to do between yard sales, and sometimes it makes for good finds. Part of my theory of yard-sale karma holds that if I miss one day at the thrift shops that'll be the day they put out the big score. So I hit the stores diligently and came up with crapola. I had offended the fates, I knew, and wouldn't make another score until I placated them. It was lonely work, and I missed Craphound's good eye and obsessive delight. I was at the cash register with a few items at the Goodwill when a guy in a suit tapped me on the shoulder. "Sorry to bother you," he said. His suit looked expensive, as did his manicure and his haircut and his wire-rimmed glasses. "I was just wondering where you found that." He gestured at a rhinestone-studded ukelele, with a cowboy hat woodburned into the body. I had picked it up with a guilty little thrill, thinking that Craphound might buy it at the next auction. "Second floor, in the toy section." "There wasn't anything else like it, was there?" " 'Fraid not," I said, and the cashier picked it up and started wrapping it in newspaper. "Ah," he said, and he looked like a little kid who'd just been told that he couldn't have a puppy. "I don't suppose you'd want to sell it, would you?" I held up a hand and waited while the cashier bagged it with the rest of my stuff, a few old clothbound novels I thought I could sell at a used bookstore, and a Grease belt buckle with Olivia Newton John on it. I led him out the door by the elbow of his expensive suit. "How much?" I had paid a dollar. "Ten bucks?" I nearly said, "Sold!" but I caught myself. "Twenty." "Twenty dollars?" "That's what they'd charge at a boutique on Queen Street." He took out a slim leather wallet and produced a twenty. I handed him the uke. His face lit up like a lightbulb.

*** After the cowboy trunk episode, I didn't run into Craphound again until the annual Rotary Club charity rummage sale at the Upper Canada Brewing Company. He was wearing the cowboy hat, six-guns, and the silver star from the cowboy trunk. It should have looked ridiculous, but the net effect was naive and somehow charming, like he was a little boy whose hair you wanted to muss. I found a box of nice old melamine dishes, in various shades of green— four square plates, bowls, salad plates, and a serving tray. I threw them in the duffel bag I'd brought and kept browsing, ignoring Craphound as he charmed a salty old Rotarian while fondling a box of leather-bound books. I browsed a stack of old Ministry of Labour licenses— barber, chiropodist, bartender, watchmaker. They all had pretty seals and were framed in stark green institutional metal. They all had different names, but all from one family, and I made up a little story to entertain myself, about the proud mother saving her sons' accreditations and framing and hanging them in the spare room with their diplomas. "Oh, George Junior's just opened his own barbershop, and little Jimmy's still fixing watches...." I bought them. In a box of crappy plastic Little Ponies and Barbies and Care Bears I found a leather Indian headdress, a wooden bow-and-arrow set, and a fringed buckskin vest. Craphound was still buttering up the leather books' owner. I bought them quick, for five bucks. "Those are beautiful," a voice said at my elbow. I turned around and smiled at the snappy dresser who'd bought the uke at the Secret Boutique. He'd gone casual for the weekend, in an expensive, L.L. Bean button-down way. "Aren't they, though." "You sell them on Queen Street? Your finds, I mean?" "Sometimes. Sometimes at auction. How's the uke?" "Oh, I got it all tuned up," he said, and smiled the same smile he'd given me when he'd taken hold of it at Goodwill. "I can play 'Don't Fence Me In' on it." He looked at his feet. "Silly, huh?" "Not at all. You're into cowboy things, huh?" As I said it, I was overcome with the knowledge that this was 'Billy the Kid,' the original owner of the cowboy trunk. I don't know why I felt that way, but I did, with utter certainty. "Just trying to relive a piece of my childhood, I guess. I'm Scott," he said, extending his hand. Scott? I thought wildly. Maybe it's his middle name? "I'm Jerry." The Upper Canada Brewery sale has many things going for it, including a beer garden where you can sample their wares and get a BBQ burger. We gently gravitated to it, looking over the tables as we went. "You're a pro, right?" he asked after we had plastic cups of beer.

"You could say that." "I'm an amateur. A rank amateur. Any words of wisdom?" I laughed and drank some beer, lit a cigarette. "There's no secret to it, I think. Just diligence: you've got to go out every chance you get, or you'll miss the big score." He chuckled. "I hear that. Sometimes, I'll be sitting in my office, and I'll just know that they're putting out a piece of pure gold at the Goodwill and that someone else will get to it before my lunch. I get so wound up, I'm no good until I go down there and hunt for it. I guess I'm hooked, eh?" "Cheaper than some other kinds of addictions." "I guess so. About that Indian stuff— what do you figure you'd get for it at a Queen Street boutique?" I looked him in the eye. He may have been something high-powered and cool and collected in his natural environment, but just then, he was as eager and nervous as a kitchen-table poker-player at a high-stakes game. "Maybe fifty bucks," I said. "Fifty, huh?" he asked. "About that," I said. "Once it sold," he said. "There is that," I said. "Might take a month, might take a year," he said. "Might take a day," I said. "It might, it might." He finished his beer. "I don't suppose you'd take forty?" I'd paid five for it, not ten minutes before. It looked like it would fit Craphound who, after all, was wearing Scott/Billy's own boyhood treasures as we spoke. You don't make a living by feeling guilty over eight hundred percent markups. Still, I'd angered the fates, and needed to redeem myself. "Make it five," I said. He started to say something, then closed his mouth and gave me a look of thanks. He took a five out of his wallet and handed it to me. I pulled the vest and bow and headdress from my duffel. He walked back to a shiny black Jeep with gold detail work, parked next to Craphound's van. Craphound was building onto the Lego body, and the hood had a miniature Lego town attached to it. Craphound looked around as he passed, and leaned forward with undisguised interest at the booty. I grimaced and finished my beer.

*** It's not that my adulthood is particularly unhappy. Likewise, it's not that my childhood was particularly happy. There are memories I have, though, that are like a cool drink of water. My grandfather's place near Milton, an old Victorian farmhouse, where the cat drank out of a milk-glass bowl; and where we sat around a rough pine table that, in my memory, is as big as my whole apartment; and where my playroom was the drafty old barn with hay-filled lofts bulging with old farm junk and Tarzan-ropes I could swing on. There was Grampa's friend Fyodor, and we took a trip out to his wrecking yard every evening so that he and Grampa could talk and smoke on the porch while I scampered around in the twilight, scaling mountains of auto-junk. The glove-boxes yielded treasure troves: crumpled photos of college boys mugging in front of tourist signs, roadmaps of faraway places, other things. I found a guidebook from the 1964 New York World's Fair, once. And a lipstick like a chrome bullet, and a pair of white leather ladies' gloves. Fyodor dealt in scrap, too, and once he had half of a carny carousel, a few horses and part of the canopy, paint flaking and sharp torn edges protruding; next to it, a Korean War tank minus its turret and caterpillar treads, and inside the tank were peeling old pinup girls and a rotation schedule and a crudely sketched Kilroy. The control room in the middle of the carousel had a stack of paperback sci-fi novels with lurid covers, Ace Doubles that had two books bound back-to-back, and when you finished the first, you turned it over and read the other. Fyodor let me keep them, and there was a pawn ticket in one from Macon, GA, for a transistor radio. My parents left me alone in the house when I got old enough, fourteen or fifteen, and then I couldn't keep myself from sneaking into their room and snooping. Mom's jewelry box had books of matches from the Acapulco hotel where they'd honeymooned, printed with a bad palm-tree motif, and the matches had green heads and wooden bodies, though they were bound like paper matches. My Dad kept an old photo in his sock drawer, of himself on Muscle Beach, shirtless, flexing his biceps, and he had a silver turnip pocket-watch that had his grandfather's initials engraved on the front. My grandmother saved every scrap of my mother's life in her basement, in dusty old Army trunks. I entertained myself endlessly by pulling then out and taking it in: her Mouse Ears from the big family train trip to Disneyland in '57, and her record albums, and the glittery pasteboard sign from her sweet sixteen. There were endless photo albums, and well-chewed stuffed animals, and school exercise books in which she'd practiced variations on her signature for page after page. It all told a story. The penciled Kilroy in the tank made me see one of those Canadian soldiers in Korea, unshaven and crew cut like an extra on M*A*S*H, sitting bored hour after hour, staring at the pinup girls, fiddling with a crossword, finally laying it down and sketching his Kilroy quickly, before anyone saw. The photo of my dad posing sent me whirling through time to Toronto's old Muscle Beach in the east end, near Kew Beach, and hearing the tinny AM radios playing weird old psychedelic rock while teenagers lounged on their Mustangs and the girls sunbathed in bikinis that made their tits into torpedoes. It all made poems. The old pulp novels and the pawn ticket, when I spread them out in the living room in front of the TV, and arranged them just so, they made up a poem that could take my breath away.

They say that when my mom was a kid, little kids imagined their dream-houses in obsessive, hyperreal clarity. That they knew what kind of dog they'd have, and what kind of fridge, and what kind of sofa, and what kind of end tables and what kind of husband, and how many kids they'd have and what they'd name them and what they'd wear. I must've inherited the gene. I'd walk into our kitchen and just stand in the center of the linoleum, and think about what was missing— the curtains, for example, should be more like Grandma's, with bright floral prints. And there was a stove in Fyodor's yard that he used as a workbench, an old cast-iron gas-fired piece from a Deco diner, that had elegant ivory knobs and a grill big enough to cook thirty burgers on at once. That would nicely replace the greenish electric stove we had. And our glasses were all wrong: Grampa had milk glasses with Li'l Orphan Annie, and Grandma's place had anodized aluminum cups in bright metallic colors that were so cold when you filled them with chocolate milk. A restaurant we'd eaten at once while on a camping trip had a mahogany-paneled lounge with solid, lion's-footed horsehair sofas. They'd look great in the living room, especially with cutglass and chrome tablelamps. Our garage had nothing but tools and bikes and spare tires. It should have had tin signs advertising nickel bottles of Coca-Cola, and Burma Shave, and patented quack remedies with hand-painted smiling babies endorsing them. The shed shouldn't have been a Sears prefab tin special— it should have been peeling old boards, with rickety wooden shelves inside and sawdust on the floor, and oiled iron tools on the walls. I knew what was wrong with every square inch of my bedroom. I needed some old patchwork quilts to sleep under, instead of the synthetic-filled comforter, and my desk should have been a salvaged steel office desk with a worn green blotter and a solid oak chair on brass wheels. The basketball-hoop light fixture had to go, and in its place I wanted wall sconces made from brutally simple wrought iron rings with blown-glass shades. The bathroom needed a bookcase. The books needed to be old and leather bound, swollen with the damp of a thousand showers, dog-eared and much-annotated. *** I live in an apartment almost west enough to be in High Park. I've got two bedrooms at the top of the three-story house that was once a Victorian but was rebuilt after a fire in the mid-'70s. It's nice enough, in a generic, post-war kind of way. It has a tremendous plus going for it: a coach-house out back that I pay another hundred bucks a month for. It's where I store my treasures, and there are three locks on the door. The apartment came furnished in no-taste Late Canadian Thrift Store, and I never got around to redecorating it, strangely enough.

What I did do, though, was hang three long shelves at the foot of my bed. That's all the space I have to keep treasures on. It's a self-regulating mechanism, preventing me from sampling too much of the merchandise. If I find a piece that I have to keep, something from the shelf has to be moved out to the coach-house and taken away to an auction or a consignment store. I have a milk-glass bowl on the shelves; a Made-in-Occupied-Japan tin tank that is pieced together from old tuna cans and hand-painted; a mint-condition Ace Double with bug-eyed monsters on both covers; a souvenir ashtray from the 1964 World's Fair; four anodized aluminum cups in brilliant metallic colors; a set of pink Mouse Ears with a girl's name stitched in cursive writing on the reverse; a silver turnip pocket watch; a small postcard with a 3-D Jesus who winks at you when you move your head; a lighter made from burnished shrapnel; other treasures that come and go. Over the years, I've found the steel desk and the wall sconces and carousel animals and tin Coca-Cola signs galore. Finding them feels right, like I've checked off an item on a checklist. They go straight into my garage without gracing my apartment even once, and selling them is never painful— it's touching them again, just once, having them pass through my possession that makes it good. When I can't bring myself to switch on the TV, I take an armload of things down from my shelves and sit on the living room floor and spread them out in front of me and see if I can't make a poem. Sometimes I laugh and sometimes I cry, but usually I just stare at them and let my mind caress each piece and match it up with a memory. *** I met Scott/Billy three times more at the Secret Boutique that week. He was a lawyer, and specialized in alien-technology patents. He had a practice on Bay Street, with two partners, and despite his youth, he was the senior man. I didn't let on that I knew about Billy the Kid and his mother in the East Muskoka Volunteer Fire Department Ladies' Auxiliary. But I felt a bond with him, as though we shared an unspoken secret. I pulled any cowboy finds for him, and he developed a pretty good eye for what I was after and returned the favor. The fates were with me again, and no two ways about it. I took home a ratty old Oriental rug that on closer inspection was a 19th-century hand-knotted Persian; an upholstered Turkish footstool; a collection of hand-painted silk Hawaiiana pillows and a carved Meerschaum pipe. Scott/Billy found the last for me, and it cost me two dollars. I knew a collector who would pay thirty in an eye-blink, and from then on, as far as I was concerned, Scott/Billy was a fellow craphound. "You going to the auction tomorrow night?" I asked him at the checkout line. "Wouldn't miss it," he said. He'd barely been able to contain his excitement when I told him about the Thursday night auctions and the bargains to be had there. He sure had the bug. "Want to get together for dinner beforehand? The Rotterdam's got a good patio." He did, and we did, and I had a glass of framboise that packed a hell of a kick and tasted like fizzy raspberry lemonade; and doorstopper fries and a club sandwich.

I had my nose in my glass when he kicked my ankle under the table. "Look at that!" It was Craphound in his van, cruising for a parking spot. The Lego village had been joined by a whole postmodern spaceport on the roof, with a red-and-blue castle, a football-sized flying saucer, and a clown's head with blinking eyes. I went back to my drink and tried to get my appetite back. "Was that an extee driving?" "Yeah. Used to be a friend of mine." "He's a picker?" "Uh-huh." I turned back to my fries and tried to kill the subject. "Do you know how he made his stake?" "The chlorophyll thing, in Saudi Arabia." "Sweet!" he said. "Very sweet. I've got a client who's got some secondary patents from that one. What's he go after?" "Oh, pretty much everything," I said, resigning myself to discussing the topic after all. "But lately, the same as you— cowboys and Injuns." He laughed and smacked his knee. "Well, what do you know? What could he possibly want with the stuff?" "What do they want with any of it? He got started one day when we were cruising the Muskokas," I said carefully, watching his face. "Found a trunk of old cowboy things at a rummage sale. East Muskoka Volunteer Fire Department Ladies' Auxiliary." I waited for him to shout or startle. He didn't. "Yeah? A good find, I guess. Wish I'd made it." I didn't know what to say to that, so I took a bite of my sandwich. Scott continued. "I think about what they get out of it a lot. There's nothing we have here that they couldn't make for themselves. I mean if they picked up and left today, we'd still be making sense of everything they gave us in a hundred years. You know, I just closed a deal for a biochemical computer that's ten thousand times faster than anything we've built out of silicon. You know what the extee took in trade? Title to a defunct fairground outside of Calgary— they shut it down ten years ago because the midway was too unsafe to ride. Doesn't that beat all? This thing is worth a billion dollars right out of the gate, I mean, within twenty-four hours of the deal closing, the seller can turn it into the GDP of Bolivia. For a crummy real-estate dog that you couldn't get five grand for!" It always shocked me when Billy/Scott talked about his job— it was easy to forget that he was a

high-powered lawyer when we were jawing and fooling around like old craphounds. I wondered if maybe he wasn't Billy the Kid; I couldn't think of any reason for him to be playing it all so close to his chest. "What the hell is some extee going to do with a fairground?" *** Craphound got a free Coke from Lisa at the check-in when he made his appearance. He bid high, but shrewdly, and never pulled $10,000 stunts. The bidders were wandering the floor, previewing the week's stock, and making notes to themselves. I rooted through a box-lot full of old tins, and found one with a buckaroo at the Calgary Stampede, riding a bucking bronc. I picked it up and stood to inspect it. Craphound was behind me. "Nice piece, huh?" I said to him. "I like it very much," Craphound said, and I felt my cheeks flush. "You're going to have some competition tonight, I think," I said, and nodded at Scott/Billy. "I think he's Billy; the one whose mother sold us— you— the cowboy trunk." "Really?" Craphound said, and it felt like we were partners again, scoping out the competition. Suddenly I felt a knife of shame, like I was betraying Scott/Billy somehow. I took a step back. "Jerry, I am very sorry that we argued." I sighed out a breath I hadn't known I was holding in. "Me, too." "They're starting the bidding. May I sit with you?" And so the three of us sat together, and Craphound shook Scott/Billy's hand and the auctioneer started into his harangue. It was a night for unusual occurrences. I bid on a piece, something I told myself I'd never do. It was a set of four matched Li'l Orphan Annie Ovaltine glasses, like Grandma's had been, and seeing them in the auctioneer's hand took me right back to her kitchen, and endless afternoons passed with my coloring books and weird old-lady hard candies and Liberace albums playing in the living room. "Ten," I said, opening the bidding. "I got ten, ten, ten, I got ten, ten, ten, who'll say twenty, who'll say twenty, twenty for the four." Craphound waved his bidding card, and I jumped as if I'd been stung. "I got twenty from the space cowboy, I got twenty, sir, will you say thirty?" I waved my card.

"That's thirty to you sir." "Forty," Craphound said. "Fifty," I said even before the auctioneer could point back to me. An old pro, he settled back and let us do the work. "One hundred," Craphound said. "One fifty," I said. The room was perfectly silent. I thought about my overextended MasterCard, and wondered if Scott/Billy would give me a loan. "Two hundred," Craphound said. Fine, I thought. Pay two hundred for those. I can get a set on Queen Street for thirty bucks. The auctioneer turned to me. "The bidding stands at two. Will you say two-ten, sir?" I shook my head. The auctioneer paused a long moment, letting me sweat over the decision to bow out. "I have two— do I have any other bids from the floor? Any other bids? Sold, two hundred dollars, to number fifty-seven." An attendant brought Craphound the tumblers. He took them and tucked them under his seat. I was fuming when we left. Craphound was at my elbow. I wanted to punch him— I'd never punched anyone in my life, but I wanted to punch him. We entered the cool night air and I sucked in several lungfuls before lighting a cigarette. "Jerry," Craphound said. I stopped, but didn't look at him. I watched the taxis pull in and out of the garage next door instead. "Jerry, my friend," Craphound said. "What?" I said, loud enough to startle myself. Scott, beside me, jerked as well. "We're going. I wanted to say goodbye, and to give you some things that I won't be taking with me." "What?" I said again, Scott just a beat behind me. "My people— we're going. It has been decided. We've gotten what we came for." Without another word, he set off toward his van. We followed along behind, shell-shocked. Craphound's exoskeleton executed another macro and slid the panel door aside, revealing the cowboy trunk.

"I wanted to give you this. I will keep the glasses." "I don't understand," I said. "You're all leaving?" Scott asked, with a note of urgency. "It has been decided. We'll go over the next twenty-four hours." "But why?" Scott said, sounding almost petulant. "It's not something that I can easily explain. As you must know, the things we gave you were trinkets to us— almost worthless. We traded them for something that was almost worthless to you— a fair trade, you'll agree— but it's time to move on." Craphound handed me the cowboy trunk. Holding it, I smelled the lubricant from his exoskeleton and the smell of the attic it had been mummified in before making its way into his hands. I felt like I almost understood. "This is for me," I said slowly, and Craphound nodded encouragingly. "This is for me, and you're keeping the glasses. And I'll look at this and feel ..." "You understand," Craphound said, looking somehow relieved. And I did. I understood that an alien wearing a cowboy hat and six-guns and giving them away was a poem and a story, and a thirtyish bachelor trying to spend half-a-month's rent on four glasses so that he could remember his grandma's kitchen was a story and a poem, and that the disused fairground outside Calgary was a story and a poem, too. "You're craphounds!" I said. "All of you!" Craphound smiled so I could see his gums and I put down the cowboy trunk and clapped my hands. Scott recovered from his shock by spending the night at his office, crunching numbers, talking on the phone, and generally getting while the getting was good. He had an edge— no one else knew that they were going. He went pro later that week, opened a chi-chi boutique on Queen Street, and hired me on as chief picker and factum factotum. Scott was not Billy the Kid. Just another Bay Street shyster with a cowboy jones. From the way they come down and spend, there must be a million of them. *** Our draw in the window is a beautiful mannequin I found, straight out of the '50s, a little boy we call The Beaver. He dresses in chaps and a sheriff's badge and six-guns and a miniature Stetson and cowboy boots with worn spurs, and rests one foot on a beautiful miniature steamer trunk whose leather is worked

with cowboy motifs. He's not for sale at any price. Jedella Ghost TANITH LEE Here's a new kind of ghost story, unlike any you've ever read before, featuring a new kind of "ghost," one who lives in the world and yet at the same time is isolated from it in a very peculiar way ... perhaps forever. Tanith Lee is one of the best-known and most prolific of modern fantasists, with more than sixty books to her credit, including (among many others) The Birthgrave, Drinking Sapphire Wine, Don't Bite the Sun, Night's Master, The Storm Lord, Sung in Shadow, Volkhavaar, Anackire, Night's Sorceries, Black Unicorn, Days of Grass, The Blood of Roses, Vivia, Reigning Cats and Dogs, When the Lights Go Out, Elephantasm, and The Gods Are Thirsty, and the collections Tamastara, The Gorgon, Dreams of Dark and Light, Nightshades, and Forests of the Night. Her short story "The Gorgon" won her a World Fantasy Award in 1983, and her short story "Elle Est Trois (La Mort)" won her another World Fantasy Award in 1984. Her brilliant collection of retold folk tales, Red As Blood, was also a finalist that year, in the Best Collection category. Her most recent book is a new novel, Faces Under Water. Her stories have appeared in our First, Second, and Fourth Annual Collections. She lives with her husband in the south of England. That fall morning, Luke Baynes had been staying a night with his grandmother up on the ridge, and he was tramping back to town through the woods. It was about an hour after sun-up, and the soft level light was caught broadcast in all the trees, molasses-red and honey-yellow. The birds sang, and squirrels played across the tracks. As he stepped on to the road above the river, Luke looked down into the valley. There was an ebbing mist, sun-touched like a bridal veil, and out of this he saw her come walking, up from the river, like a ghost. He knew at once she was a stranger, and she was young, pale and slight in an old-fashioned long dark dress. Her hair was dark, too, hanging down her back like a child's. As she got closer he saw she was about 18, a young woman. She had, he said, not a pretty face, but serene, pleasing; he liked to look at her. And she, as she came up to him, looked straight at him, not boldly or rudely, but with an open interest. Luke took off his hat, and said, "Good morning." And the girl nodded. She said, "Is there a house near here?" Luke said there was, several houses, the town was just along the way. She nodded again, and thanked him. It was, he said, a lovely voice, all musical and lilting upward, like a smile. But then she went and sat at the roadside, where a tree had been cut and left a stump. She looked away from him now, up into the branches. It was as if there was nothing more to say. He did ask if he could assist her. She answered at once, "No, thank you." And so, after a moment, he left her there, though he was not sure he should do. But she did not appear concerned or worried. "She had the strangest shoes," he said. "Her shoes?" I asked. Luke had never seemed a man for noting the footware of women, or of anyone. "They were the colours of the woods," he said, "crimson and gold and green. And— they seemed to me like they were made of glass." "Cinderella," I said, "run off from the ball."

"But she had on both," he said, and grinned. After this we went for coffee and cake at Millie's. *** I had no doubt he had seen this woman, but I thought perhaps he had made more of her than there was. Because I am a writer people sometimes try to work spells on me— Oh, John Cross, this will interest you. You can write about this. It does them credit, really, to make their imaginations work. But they should take up the pen, not I. Usually, I have enough ideas of my own. About ten, I went back to my room to work, and did not come out again until three. And then I, too, saw Luke's lady of the mist. She was standing in the square, under the old cobweb trees, looking up at the white tower of the church, on which the clock was striking the hour. People going about were glancing at her curiously, and even the old-timers on the bench outside the stables were eying her. She was a stranger, and graceful as a lily. And sure enough, she seemed to have on sparkling stained-glass shoes. When the clock stopped, she turned and looked around her. Do any of us look about that way? Human things are cautious, circumspect— or conversely arrogant. And she was none of these. She looked the way a child does, openly, perhaps not quite at ease, but not on guard. And then she saw— evidently she saw— the old men on the bench, Will Marks and Homer Avory and Nut Warren. She became very still, gazing at them, until they in turn grew uneasy. They did not know what to do, I could see, and Nut, who was coming on for 90 years, he turned belligerent. I stepped out and crossed the square, and came right up to her, standing between her and the old boys. "Welcome to our town. My name's John Cross." "I'm Jedella," she said at once. "I'm glad to meet you. Can I help?" "I'm lost," she said. I could not think at once what to say. Those that are lost do not speak in this way. I knew it even then. Jedella said presently, "You see, I've lived all my life in one place, and now— here I am." "Do you have kin here?" "Kin?" she said. "I have no kin." "I'm sorry. But is there someone—?" "No," she said. "Oh, I'm tired. I'd like a drink of water. To sit down." I said, and I thought myself even then hard and cruel, "Your shoes."

"Oh. That was my fault. I should have chosen something else." "Are they glass?" "I don't know," she said. I took her straight across to Millie's, and in the big room sat her at a table, and when the coffee came, she drank it down. She seemed comfortable with coffee, and I was surprised. I had already realized, maybe, that the things of civilized life were not quite familiar to her. Hannah returned and refilled our cups— Jedella had refused my offer of food. But as Hannah went away Jedella looked after her. The look was deep and sombre. She had eyes, Jedella, like the rivers of the Greek Hell— melancholy, and so dark. "What's wrong with her?" "With—?" "With that woman who brought the coffee." Hannah was a robust creature, about 40. She was the wife of Abel Sorrensen, and had five children, all bright and sound— a happy woman, a nice woman. I had never seen her sick or languishing. "Hannah Sorrensen is just fine." "But—" said Jedella. She stared at me, then the stare became a gaze. "Oh, those men outside ..." "The old men on the bench," I said. Jedella said, "I'm sorry, I don't mean to be impertinent." I said, squaring my shoulders, "I think you should see Doc McIvor. He's bound to have some plan of how to go on." I had formed the impression she was a little mad. And, I confess, I wondered how she would react to the notion of a doctor. But Jedella smiled at me, and then I saw what Luke had only heard in her voice. Her smile made her beautiful. For a moment I saw her as my muse. I wondered if I would fall in love with her, and feed upon her mystery. The writer can be selfish. But, in my own defence, I knew that here was something rare, precious— rich and strange. "Of course I'll see him," she said. "I have no one, and nowhere to go. How kind you are." *** What happens when the doctor is sick? An old adage to be sure. But Doc McIvor had gone to visit his

niece in the city, who was expecting her first baby. Everyone knew but me. But then, I had only lived in the town for five years. I did not want, I admit, to give Jedella, with her Lethe eyes and Cinderella shoes and heavenly smile, over to the law, so I took her to my rooming-house, and there Abigail Anchor came sweeping forth in her purple dress. "I can give her that little room on the west side," said Abigail. "This girl has run away. I know it." "Do you think so?" I asked. "Oh, to be sure. Her daddy is some harsh man. Perhaps forcing her to marry. I won't sit in judgement, Mr. Cross. Indeed, Mr. Cross, you may know more than you say. But I won't ask it—" "I don't know anything, Mrs. Anchor." "That's as you say, Mr. Cross." *** I met Luke Baynes that night in the Tavern. We had a beer. He grinned at me again. "They're talking. Your sweetheart's stashed away at Ma Anchor's." "Yours and mine. You saw her first." "Then it is the girl with glass shoes." "A strange one," I said. "She keeps to herself. But when I came out tonight, she was at her window and the blind was raised. She was looking along the street." Luke said, "Don't you know anything?" "Not a thing. Abigail has sheltered her from the goodness of her heart. Her name's Jedella." "I don't believe," said Luke, "she's real. She's a ghost." "I took her arm," I said. "She's real as you or I." "What is it then?" he said. "I think she's crazy. A little crazy. Probably someone will come after her. She can't have come far." "But," he said, "she's— wonderful." "Yes," I said. "A fascinating woman. The woman you can't have is always fascinating." "You're too clever," he said. "I fancy going courting."

"Don't," I said. I frowned into my drink. "Don't." *** Two weeks passed, and Jedella lived in the room on the west side of the Anchor house. She gave no trouble, and I had had a word with Abigail about the rent. I believe Abigail helped with any female things that Jedella might have needed, and certainly, I was presented with a bill before too long. My trade had brought me moderate success, and I did not flinch. Otherwise, I saw no reason to interfere. I gathered from Abigail that Jedella did not much wish to go out, yet seemed quite well. She ate her meals in private, and enjoyed the services of the house. Now and then I noted Jedella at her window, gazing along the street. Once I lifted my hand, but she did not respond. I let it go at that. Of course, word had got around about the unknown young woman. I was sometimes pestered, but knowing next to nothing myself, could be of little assistance. Did I want to draw Jedella out? Rather, I was inclined to avoid her. Real life that takes the form of a story, or appears to, is so often disappointing. Or, if one learns some gem, must one become a traitor who can no longer be trusted with anything? I prefer to invent, and that keeps me busy enough. Luke did try to introduce himself to the woman on the west side. He took her flowers one afternoon, and a box of sweets in a green bow another. But, Jedella apparently seemed only amazed. She did not respond as a woman should, hopefully a flirtatious, willing woman. He was baffled, and retreated, to the relief of the two or three young ladies of the town who had such hopes of him, some day. On the last Friday of that second week, just as I had finished a long story for the Post, I heard at Millie's that Homer Avory had died in his bed. He was nearly 80, which for the town is quite a youngster, and his daughter was in a rage, it seemed, for she had always loved him and had been planning a birthday dinner. Everyone went to a funeral then, and presently I heard it was fixed for Tuesday. I looked out my black suit with a sensation of the droll and the sad. My father had once warned me, "You don't feel a death, John, not truly, till you start to feel your own." He was 50 when he said this, and he died two years after, so I may not argue. But I felt it was a shame about Homer, and about his daughter, who was 60 herself, and had lost her husband ten months before to a fever. On Monday evening I was reading some books that had come in the mail, when a light knock sounded on my door. It was not Abigail, evidently, who thundered, nor Luke, who burst in. I went to see, and there stood the apparition called Jedella, still in her dark dress, but with a new pair of simple shoes. Her hair was done up on her head. "Good evening, Miss Jedella. Can I help you?" "Mr. Cross," she said, "something is happening tomorrow."

"Tomorrow? Oh, do you mean poor old Homer's funeral?" "That," she said, "is what Abigail Anchor called it." "Abigail? Well, what else. A burial, a funeral." She stared straight at me. She said, still and low, "But what is that?" Abigail had her rules, but it was just light. I drew Jedella into the room and left the door an inch ajar. I made her sit down in my comfortable chair, and moved the books. "How do you mean, Miss Jedella?" She seemed for a moment disturbed. Then she composed her pale face and said, "They say the— old man— has died." "He has." "Was he one of the three men I saw in the square that day?" "Yes, just so." "He has some terrible illness," she said. She looked about distractedly. "Am I right?" This unnerved me. I could not put it together. I recalled, I had thought her slightly insane. I said, quietly, "Unfortunately, he was old, and so he died. But, please believe, he had no ailment. He passed away peacefully in his sleep, I gather." "But what do you mean?" she said. "He's dead," I answered. "I'm afraid it happens." I had intended irony, but she gazed at me with such pathos, I felt myself colour, as if I had insulted her. I did not know what to say next. She spoke first. "This funeral, what is it?" "Jedella," I said firmly, "do you say you don't know what a funeral is?" "No," said Jedella, "I have no idea." If I had been three years younger, I suspect I would have thought myself the victim or some game. But peculiar things happen. Oddities, differences. I sat down in the other chair. "When a man dies, we put him in the earth. If you are religious, you reckon he waits there for the last trumpet, which summons him up to God." "In the earth," she said. "But how can he stand it— is it some punishment?"

"He's dead," I replied, like stone. "He won't know." "How can he not know?" In the window, the light of day was going out. And it came to me, as sometimes it did when a child, that perhaps this was the end, and the sun would never return. In ten minutes or so, Abigail's boy would sound the bell for dinner. Jedella did not join the communal table. "Jedella," I said, "I can't help you. It's too profound a question for me. Can I ask the minister to call on you?" She said, "Why?" "He may be able to assist you." She said, looking at me, her countenance bewildered and yet serene even now, as if she had seen that I and all the world were mad—"This is a terrible place. I wish that I could help you, but I don't know how. How can you bear it, Mr. Cross, when you witness such suffering?" I smiled. "I agree, it can be difficult. But then, it could have been worse. We all come to it." She said, "To what?" The bell rang. Perhaps it was early, or I had misjudged. I said, "Well, you're very young, Jedella." Some phantom of my father's words, perhaps. But Jedella went on looking at me with her Lethe eyes. She said, flatly, "What does that mean?" "Now this is silly. You keep asking me that. I mean that you're young. About sixteen, maybe." I confess, I tried to flatter, making her a little less than she appeared to be. One should always be careful with a woman's age, one way or the other. In those days 16 was the dividing line; now it is more 20. But Jedella, who Luke had thought a ghost, stared into my face. She was not flattered. She said, "Sixteen years do you mean? Of course not." "Sixteen, eighteen, whatever it may be." Outside, my fellow boarders were going down the stairs; they would hear us talking and realize that John Cross had the woman in his room. Jedella stood up. The last glimmer of light was behind her, and played about her slender shape, making her seem suddenly thin and despoiled. Abigail must have persuaded her to put up her hair. She was a shadow, and all at once, the shadow of someone else, as if I had seen through her— but to what? "I am," she said, "sixty-five years of age."

I laughed. But it was a laugh of fright. For I could see her there like a little old lady, five years on from Homer's daughter. "I'm going down to my meal, Jedella. Are you willing to come?" "No," she said. She turned, moved; the new lamplight from beyond the door caught her. She was 18. She went out on to the landing, and away up the house. *** What we ate that night I have no notion. Someone— Clark, I think— regaled us with jokes, and everyone guffawed, but for Miss Pim, and Abigail, who did not approve. I chuckled, too— but God knows why. Did I even hear what was said? In the end we remembered, Homer was to go into the ground tomorrow, and a silence fell. I recall how Abigail lighted a candle in the window, a touching gesture, old superstition, but kind and sweet, to guide a soul home. I had mentioned nothing of what Jedella had said to me, and no one had ventured to ask what she and I had had to converse on. In my room, I walked about. I lit the lamp and picked up my books, and put them down. Over in the west end of the house, she was, that girl with dark hair, who had come up from the morning mist, like a ghost. In God's name, what had she been talking of? What did she suggest? What did she want? I have said, if I had been a few years younger, I would have thought it a game. And, 40 years older, as now I am, I might have deemed it quite proper, to go across the house and knock on the door. Times change, and customs with them. It was not possible then. At length I went to bed, and lay in the dark, with all the gentle quiet of that place about me, my haven from the city. But I could not rest. She said she did not know what a funeral was, she inquired how he could bear it, Homer, going into the ground. She told me she was 65 years old. She was mad. She had come from the river in stained glass shoes, and she was crazy. I dreamed I was at my father's burial, which once I had been, but no one else was there, save for Jedella. And she looked down into the pit of black earth, and she said to me, "Will you leave him here?" I woke with tears on my face. I had not wanted to leave him there. Not my father, that lovable and good man, who had given me so much. But surely it had not been my father any more, down there in the dark? The first light was coming, and I got up and sat by the window. The town was calm and the birds sang. Far off beyond the woods and the forests of pines, I could see, it was so clear, the transparent aurora of

the mountains. *** I knocked on Jedella's door about 9:30 in the morning, and when she opened it, I said, "Will you walk with me?" I wanted no more clandestine meetings in the rooms. The funeral was at two. Outside there was nothing out of the ordinary going on. The trees had on their scalding full colour. The stores were open, and a dog or two were nosing down the street. Jedella looked at all this, in a sad, silent way. She reminded me of a widow. We went into the square, and sat on the vacant bench under the cobweb trees. "I want you to tell me, Jedella, where you come from. If you will." She said, "Beyond the woods. Up in the pines. A house there." "How far away?" I said. I was baffled. "I don't know. It took me a day to reach this town. A day, and the night before." "Why did you come here?" "I didn't know what else to do. I didn't mean to come. I was only walking." "Why then did you leave the house— the house in the pines?" "They had all gone," she said. For a moment she looked the way I have only seen human things look after some great disaster, the wreck of a train, the random horror of a war. I did not know it then. What she spoke of was a terror beyond her grasp. It had hurt her, but it had no logic, like the acts of God. "Who had gone?" "The people who were there with me. Often they did, of course, but not all at once. The house was empty. I looked." "Tell me about the house." Then she smiled. It was the lovely, lilting smile. This memory made her happy. "It was where I was, always." "Where you were born?" I asked. As if from far off, she smiled on at me. "The first thing I remember," she said. She sat on the bench, and I realized absently that in her old-fashioned dress, she was clad as an old lady, like Homer's daughter or Elsie Baynes, or some other elder woman of our town. The air was sweet and

crisp and summer had died. I said, "I'd like to hear." "It's a big white house," she said, "and there are lots of rooms. I was usually in the upper house, though sometimes I went down. All around was a high wall, but I could see the tops of the trees. There were trees inside the garden, too, and I walked there every day, except in winter. Then it was too cold, when the snow was down." "Who was in the house with you?" "Many people. Oh, lots of people, Mr. Cross. They looked after me." Curiously I said, as if encouraging a child. "Who did you like the best?" "I liked them all— but you see, they didn't stay for long. No one ever stayed." She was sad once more, but in a deeper, softer way. She was indeed like a child, that was what I finally saw then, a child in an old lady's dress, which fitted. "When I was a girl," she said, oddly mimicking my thought, "I used to be upset by it, the going away. But in the end, I knew that it had to be." "Why did it have to be?" I asked, blindly. "That was their lives. But I remained. That was mine." "Tell me more about the house," I said. "Oh, it was only a house. It was where I lived. Some of the rooms were large, and some, my bedroom, for example, quite small." "What did you do there?" "I read the books, and I painted on paper. And I played the piano. There was always something to do." "Your father and mother," I said. Jedella glanced at me. "What do you mean?" The sun was warm on my face and hands, and yet the air was cool. A blue shadow descended from the tower of the church. Something had hold of me now, it held me back. I said, "Well, tell me about something that you enjoyed especially." She laughed. Her laugh was so pretty, so truthful and young. "There were a great many things. I used to imagine places, places I'd never been— cities of towers from the books I'd read, and rivers and seas. And animals, too. There are lions and tigers and bears, aren't there?" "So I believe." "Yes, I believe it, too. Have you ever seen them?" "In cages," I said. She looked startled a moment. But then she brushed that away from her like a fallen leaf. "I longed to see

them, and they said, one day." I said, "Did they tell you when?" "No. I suppose it was meant to be now. After I left the house." "Then they told you you must leave?" "Oh no. But when they were gone, the doors were all open. And the big door in the wall, that, too." I was trying now, quite hard, to follow along with her, not to delay or confuse by protestations. I thought how, when I had spoken of her being born, she had had that look of the polite guest at the party, when you say something he does not understand, but is too nice to debate on. "The door had never been open before?" "No, never." "Did— they— say why not?" "I never asked, because, you see, it was the way I lived. I didn't need anything else." She was young— or was she young?— yet surely there had been some yearning, like her wish to see the animals from the books. The young feel they are prisoners even when they are not, or not decidedly. Something came to me. I said, "Did you see pictures in your books of lion cubs?" "Oh yes," she said. I said, "And once, you were a child." "Of course." Above us the clock struck— it must have done so before. Now it was noon. Jedella looked about her. She said, "Something's very wrong here. Can't you tell me what it is?" "It's the way we are, the way we live," I said. She sighed. She said, and there was that in her voice that filled me with a sort of primeval fear, "Is it like this everywhere?" I said, intuitively, "Yes, Jedella." Then she said, "Abigail Anchor brought some books up to me. It was a kindness. I didn't understand them." "In what way?" "Things happen in those books— that don't happen."

I could have said this might be true of much poor fiction. But clearly she did not imply this. "You had books in your house," I said. "What about those books?" "Parts had been cut away," she said. I said nothing, but as if I had, she added, "I used to ask where those pieces were. But they said the books had been there a long time, that was all." I said, blindly, as before, "For example, the lion cubs were there, and they grew up into lions. But you didn't know how they had arrived there." She was silent. I said, "And how long did the lions live, Jedella? Did the books say?" Jedella the ghost, turned her dark eyes on me. She was no longer a temptation, not my muse. She said, "Always, of course. To live— is to live." "For ever?" She said and she did nothing. I felt my heart beat in a wild random crescendo, and all at once that peaceful square, that town where I had come to be quiet, was rushing all apart, like a jigsaw, broken. Then it settled. My heart settled. "Will you come," I said, "to Homer's funeral?" "If you think so," she said. I got up and offered her my arm. "We'll take some lunch in Millie's. Then we'll go on." Her hand was light on me, as a leaf of the fall. *** She was quiet and nearly motionless all through the ceremony, and though she looked down at his old, creased, vacant face, before the coffin was closed, she made no fuss about it. But when everything was done, and we stood alone on the path, she said, "I used to watch the squirrels playing, in the trees and along the tops of the wall. They were black squirrels. I used to throw them little bits of cake. One day, John Cross, I saw a squirrel lying there on the grass in the garden. It didn't move. It was so still I was able to stroke its side. Then someone came from the house. I think it was a man called Orlen. And he picked up the squirrel. He said to me, 'Poor thing, it's fallen and stunned itself. Sometimes they do. Don't fret, Jedella. I'll take it back to its tree, and it will get better.' " Over the lawn, Homer's daughter walked, leaning on the arm of her son. She was rubbing at her face angrily muttering about the meat dishes and the sweet pie she had been going to make for the birthday. Her son held his hat across his middle, head bowed, troubled the way we often are at grief we cannot share. "So the squirrel was stunned," I said. "Yes. And later he pointed it out to me, running along the wall."

"That same squirrel." "He told me that it was." "And you think now that Homer is only stunned, and we've thrown him down into the ground, and now they'll cover him with earth, so he can't get out." We stood, two respectful and well-behaved figures. Her life had been an acceptance, and she was coming to accept even now the unacceptable. "Jedella, will you describe for me very carefully the way you came here, from your house in the pines?" "If you want." "It would be a great help," I said. "You see, I mean to go there." "I can't go back," she said. I thought she was like Eve, cast out of Eden because she had failed to eat the Forbidden fruit. "No, I won't make you. But I think I must. There may be some clue to all of this." She did not argue with me. She had begun to accept also her utter difference, and that she was outnumbered. She guessed something had been done to her; as I did. She had ceased to debate, and would never resist. *** When I first took up my life here, I went frequently to walk or ride in the wooded country. Then I got down to my work and adventured less. To ride out on this cold bright morning was no penance, though I had grown a little stiff, and guessed I should feel it later, which I did. The horse was a pretty mare by the name of May. We went with care along the route Jedella had outlined, even drawing— she had a fair hand with a pencil— landmarks I might look for. Beyond the road we climbed into the woods and so up the hill called Candy Crag, and over into the pines. I was high up by nightfall, and I could feel the cold blowing down from the distant snow-lined mountains. I thought, as I made my camp, I might hear a wolf call up on the heights, but there was only stillness and the swarm of the stars. Such great calm is in those places and the sense of Infinity. Some men can only live there, but for me, I should be lost. I like the little things. This was enough, a night or two, a day or two, up so close to the sky. At dawn I went on. A couple of times I saw my fellow humans. A trapper with his gun, a man far down on the river. Both glimpsed me, and hailed me, and I them. For the rest the wild things of the woods came and went, a porcupine, a deer, the birds, the insects. May stepped mildly through their landscape, her skin shining like a flame. I spoke to her now and then, and sang her a few songs.

I found the house with no trouble in the afternoon of that second day. Jedella had travelled more quickly than I, unless she had lost track of time. You could see the mountains from there very well, a vast white battlement rising from the pelt of the pines. But near at hand, the forest was thick, so dense we had to pick our way. The house was in a clearing, as Jedella had told me, shut round with its tall white wall. It had a strange look, as if it had no proper architecture, no style of anywhere at all. Like boxes put together, and roofs put on, and windows set in. Something a child had made, but a child without fantasies. The gate was open, and the sunlight slanted down through the trees and showed me a man standing there, on the path. He wore a white suit, and was smoking a cigarette. I had become used to the pipes and chewing-tobacco of my town. And somehow I had anticipated— God knows what. He was a very old man, too, but spare and upright, with a mane of thick, whitish hair, and eyebrows dark as bands of iron. He lifted his hand, as he saw me. And this was not the lonely greeting of the trapper or the river man. I could see, he had expected me, or someone. Had he come there to wait for me? I am not given to drama, except sometimes when I write, and can have it there on my own terms. But I eased myself off the horse and undid my saddlebag and took out the two brightly coloured shoes that looked as if they were made of glass, and holding these out, I walked up to him. "Jedella's slippers," he said. "Did she get so far in them?" "Quite far." "They're not glass," he said, "something I fashioned, when I was younger. A sort of resin." "I'd hoped," I said, "you would come and fetch her." "No, I can't do that. I haven't time now. It had to end, and she has to go on as best she can. She wouldn't know me now, in any case. She saw me for five or six years, when she was a child, and I was in my twenties." "That would make her old," I said. "Sixty-five is her age." "So she said." "And of course," he said, "it can't be, for she is eighteen or nineteen, a girl." Behind me, May shook her amber head, as if in warning, and a bird hammered a moment on the trunk of a tree. "I came here," I said, "hoping to find out." "Yes, I know it. And I shall tell you. I am Jedediah Goëste, and for now this house is mine. Will you step inside?"

I went with him up the path, leading May, who I settled in a sunny place. The trees were all around inside the wall, the trees where the black squirrels played. I had been struck by his name— Scandinavian, perhaps, and its affinity of sound to what Luke and I had come to call her: Miss Ghost. Jedediah, too, the father's name, and the daughter taking a feminized version, Jedella. Was it so simple? For yes, if he had been in his 20s, he would be near his 90s now, and she would be 65. Inside the door was an open room, white-walled, quite pleasant, with ornaments and pictures, and with a large fireplace where some logs and cones were burning. Hot coffee stood on a table. Had he known the hour of my coming? No, that was too fanciful. It seemed to me I had better be as careful as I had been when riding through the denseness of the pines. Something strange there was, but not all of it could or need be. A wide staircase ran up from the room and above was a sort of gallery. I noticed another man standing there, and Jedediah Goëste gestured to him quietly, and the man went away. "My servant. He won't disturb us." "Is that Orlen?" I said. "Oh, no. Orlen is long gone. But Orlen was a favourite of Jedella's, I believe, when she was still a child. It was a pity they all had to leave her. She used to cry in the beginning. She cried when I left her. But later, they told me, she was philosophical. She had grown accustomed." I had given him in turn my name, and he had taken the privilege of the old to call me at once John. We sat down in two large velvet armchairs, and I drank some of the coffee, hot and sweet and good. "I have come back here," he said, "to die. It's comfortable for me here, and I have all I want. A few months, no more." I said, "Then shouldn't you have kept her here?" "She was given, implicitly, the choice. She might have remained, although I didn't think she would. If she had been here when I returned, I would, I think, have had to pretend to be someone else. And even then, the shock—" "Your age. But it's your death that was the reason for letting her go." "Yes. I can't anymore manage things, you see. The experiment is over." "Experiment," I said. "Come now," he said, "I believe you grasp it, John. I truly believe you do." "I've read rather widely," I said. "Years ago, I came across the legend of the Buddha." Goëste folded his hands. He smiled his old strong teeth. "Buddha was originally a prince," I said, "and they resolved to keep all ugly things from him— poverty, disease, old age and death. He saw only beauty. Until one day something went wrong, and he found out the truth." Jedediah Goëste said. "You see, John, I began to think of it even when I was quite young. From the start,

everything comes our way. Even when they tell us lies, the facts are still before us. There is a moment when we must work it out. The old lady in the mauve dress with her hands crippled by rheumatics. The dead dog the cart ran over. The bird shot for the table. In Europe in the Middle Ages they fixed a skull over the church door. Under that skull was written, Remember thou shall be as me." He leaned back. His eyes were black, like hers, but, paler with the watery encroachment of old age. "How does the infant learn?" he said. "He copies. The sounds from the mouths that become language. The gestures that become manners. The opinions that he will either adopt or rebel against. And he learns that the sun rises and sets, and as the days and the years go by, he grows, he changes. All around, the lesson is we grow to our fullness, but after that we decline. From the summit of that hill, the path leads downwards. Down to weakness and sickness, down to the first lines and wrinkles, the stiffening and the lessening. Down to the bowed spine and the loss of teeth and sight and hearing. Down into the grave that awaits us all. Remember thou shall be as me. We are taught from the commencement, and reminded over and over." He pointed at the rug before the fire, where I had laid the glass shoes that were not. "I made those, to show it could be done. I've done many things like that. I had money, John, and time, and a brain. And, I confess, here and there I have experimented with living things— not to hurt them, never that. But to see. Always, to see." "Jedella," I said, "was never told about old age, or death. Illness was for some reason mentioned, but as something that no longer existed. Pages were cut from books. The people of the house were always young and fit, and when it became likely they would cease to be, they were sent away. And when a squirrel died under her window, Orlen told her it was stunned, and took it back to its tree, and later he showed her the squirrel running on the wall." "A girl came to me in the city," said Jedediah Goëste, "it was shocking, I had given her a child. She didn't want it. So she was paid, and I took the child to myself. That was Jedella. She was a baby— younger than Buddha, who I believe was twelve— too young to have learned anything at all. It was so perfect, John, and I had the means. I brought her here, and for those first years I was her friend. And after, of necessity, I had gone, those who came after me carried on my work. They were well-recompensed, and clever. There were no mistakes. She grew up in a world where no one sickened or aged or died. Where nothing died, and no death was seen, not even the dead animals for her food. Not even the leaves of the trees." It was true. She had seen only the pines, renewal but not obvious slough— and then she had come from the open door and down into the woods of fall, where ruby and yellow and wine, the death descends from every tree. "Now she sees it," I said. "She saw it as sickness to begin with. Or something that made no sense. But she's turning towards the terrible fact, Mr Goëste, that all things perish." "Recollect," he said, "that she is sixty-five years old. She's like a girl. So many lessons, all the same. Can they be unlearned?" I stood up. I was not angry, I have no word for what I was. But I could no longer sit in the chair before the fire nor drink the fragrant coffee, nor look in that old man's face that was so strong and sure. "You've acted God, Mr Goëste." "Have I? How can we presume to know how God has acted, or would act?"

"You think you've made her eternally young. You think you've made her immortal." "I may have done," he said. I answered him, "In a world where all things come to an end— what will become of her?" "You will take care of her now," he said, so easily, so gently. "Your quiet little town. Good people. Kind people." "But her pain," I said, "her pain." Jedediah Goëste looked at me with her look. He was innocent, in her way. There was no chance against such innocence. "Pain, I think, is after all in the unfathomable jurisdiction of God. I've never been able to believe that mankind, for all its faults, could devise so horrible and so complex a thing." "She never questioned?" I asked. "Questions spring from doubt. Now she questions, I imagine?" A log cracked in the fire. There was a small ache in my back I would not have had a year ago. "If you wish, I should be happy for you to be my guest tonight, John." I thanked him and made some excuse. Even then, even there, the etiquette of my father stayed with me. Those first lessons. As I reached the door, Jedediah Goëste said one final thing to me: "I'm glad that she found her way to you." But she had not found her way to me, nor to anyone, how could she? She had not found her way. *** The years have passed in the town, and it has been faithful to Jedella. She has been protected as best we might. She has her little house behind the church, and her piano that we sent for from the city, her paints, her books— all kinds of books now. She reads for days on end, with her clear dark eyes. Sometimes she will read something out for me when even my glasses fail to help with the small print. More people have come to the town with time, and for them she is a mystery that, largely, they are indifferent to. The new creatures of the world are very self-involved and this has taken away some of the curiosity, the prying, that came to us so naturally. But then, the avalanches of war, and fear of war, the wonderful inventions that cause so much harm and confusion and noise, all these things change us, the children of this other world, much more so. Luke died in a war. I have said elsewhere, and will not here, what I did there. Many were lost, or lost themselves. But others take those places. I was even famous for a year, and travelled in the cities and on other continents, and grew tired and came home. And there the town was in its misty morning silence that

the new cacophony cannot quite break. That was a morning like this one, a fall morning, with the colours on the trees, and the new restaurant, where Millie's used to be, was having its windows washed. But today the restaurant is old and familiar, and instead I passed Jedella's house, and she came out and I knew I should go in, just for an hour, maybe, and drink coffee, and eat her chocolate cake which she vaunts, and rightly so. I went with caution over that road, for now there are sometimes motorbikes upon it, and as I did I saw her waiting, pale and slender, a girl, with her hair cut short and permed and a touch of lipstick on her mouth. She touched my arm at her door. "Look, John," she said. My eyes are not so good as I would like, but there in the pure, sheer sunlight, I did my best to see. She pointed at her cheek, and then, she put one finger to her hair. "Is it your powder, Jedella? Yes, your hair looks grand." And then I did see, as she stood smiling up at me, her eyes full of the morning, of the new beginning of all things, I did see what she had found to show me with such pride. The little crease that had grown in her cheek. The single bright silver hair. Taklamakan BRUCE STERLING One of the most powerful and innovative talents to enter SF in recent decades, a man with a rigorously worked out and aesthetically convincing vision of what the future may have in store for humanity, Bruce Sterling as yet may still be better known to the cognoscenti than to the SF-reading population at large, in spite of a recent Hugo win. If you look behind the scenes, though, you will find him everywhere, and he had almost as much to do— as writer, critic, propagandist, aesthetic theorist, and tireless polemicist-with the shaping and evolution of SF in the eighties and nineties as Michael Moorcock did with the shaping of SF in the sixties. It is not for nothing that many of the other writers of the eighties and nineties refer to him, half ruefully, half admiringly, as "Chairman Bruce." Bruce Sterling sold his first story in 1976. By the end of the eighties, he had established himself— with a series of stories set in his exotic Shaper/Mechanist future, with novels such as the complex and Stapeldonian Schismatrix and the well-received Islands in the Net (as well as with his editing of the influential cyberpunk anthology Mirrorshades and the infamous critical magazine Cheap Truth)— as perhaps the prime driving force behind the revolutionary cyberpunk movement in science fiction (rivaled for that title only by his friend and collaborator, William Gibson), and also as one of the best new "hard-science" writers to enter the field in some time. His other books include a critically acclaimed nonfiction study of First Amendment issues in the world of computer networking, The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier; the novels The

Artificial Kid, Involution Ocean, Heavy Weather, Holy Fire; a novel in collaboration with William Gibson, The Difference Engine; and the landmark collections Crystal Express and Globalhead. His most recent books include the omnibus collection, (containing the novel Schismatrix as well as most of his Shaper/Mechanist stories) Schismatrix Plus, and a new novel, Distraction. Coming up is a new collection, A Good Old-Fashioned Future. His story "Bicycle Repairman" earned him a long-overdue Hugo in 1997. His stories have appeared in our First, Second, Third, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, Eighth, Eleventh, and Fourteenth Annual Collections. He lives with his family in Austin, Texas. His Web site is at http://www.well.com/conf/mirrorshades. In the fast-paced and ingenious story that follows, he takes us along with two ambitious freelance, high-tech spies who have the grit and chutzpah to penetrate a bizarre lost world no outsider has ever seen before, where strange dangers and even stranger wonders await them— some of which may well turn out to be fatal! A bone-dry frozen wind tore at the earth outside, its lethal howling cut to a muffled moan. Katrinko and Spider Pete were camped deep in a crevice in the rock, wrapped in furry darkness. Pete could hear Katrinko breathing, with a light rattle of chattering teeth. The neuter's yeasty armpits smelled like nutmeg. Spider Pete strapped his shaven head into his spex. Outside their puffy nest, the sticky eyes of a dozen gelcams splayed across the rock, a sky-eating web of perception. Pete touched a stud on his spex, pulled down a glowing menu, and adjusted his visual take on the outside world. Flying powder tumbled through the yardangs like an evil fog. The crescent moon and a billion desert stars, glowing like pixelated bruises, wheeled above the eerie wind-sculpted landscape of the Taklamakan. With the exceptions of Antarctica, or maybe the deep Sahara— locales Pete had never been paid to visit— this central Asian desert was the loneliest, most desolate place on Earth. Pete adjusted parameters, etching the landscape with a busy array of false colors. He recorded an artful series of panorama shots, and tagged a global positioning fix onto the captured stack. Then he signed the footage with a cryptographic time-stamp from a passing NAFTA spy-sat. 1/15/2052 05:24:01. Pete saved the stack onto a gelbrain. This gelbrain was a walnut-sized lump of neural biotech, carefully grown to mimic the razor-sharp visual cortex of an American bald eagle. It was the best, most expensive piece of photographic hardware that Pete had ever owned. Pete kept the thing tucked in his crotch. Pete took a deep and intimate pleasure in working with the latest federally subsidized spy gear. It was quite the privilege for Spider Pete, the kind of privilege that he might well die for. There was no tactical use in yet another spy-shot of the chill and empty Taklamakan. But the tagged picture would prove that Katrinko and Pete had been here at the appointed rendezvous. Right here, right now. Waiting for the man. And the man was overdue. During their brief professional acquaintance, Spider Pete had met the Lieutenant Colonel in a number of deeply unlikely locales. A parking garage in Pentagon City. An outdoor seafood restaurant in Cabo San Lucas. On the ferry to Staten Island. Pete had never known his patron to miss a rendezvous by so much

as a microsecond. The sky went dirty white. A sizzle, a sparkle, a zenith full of stink. A screaming-streaking-tumbling. A nasty thunderclap. The ground shook hard. "Dang," Pete said. *** They found the Lieutenant Colonel just before eight in the morning. Pieces of his landing pod were violently scattered across half a kilometer. Katrinko and Pete skulked expertly through a dirty yellow jumble of wind-grooved boulders. Their camou gear switched coloration moment by moment, to match the landscape and the incidental light. Pete pried the mask from his face, inhaled the thin, pitiless, metallic air, and spoke aloud. "That's our boy all right. Never missed a date." The neuter removed her mask and fastidiously smeared her lips and gums with silicone anti-evaporant. Her voice fluted eerily over the insistent wind. "Space-defense must have tracked him on radar." "Nope. If they'd hit him from orbit, he'd really be spread all over.... No something happened to him really close to the ground." Pete pointed at a violent scattering of cracked ochre rock. "See, check out how that stealth-pod hit and tumbled. It didn't catch fire till after the impact." With the absent ease of a gecko, the neuter swarmed up a three-story-high boulder. She examined the surrounding forensic evidence at length, dabbing carefully at her spex controls. She then slithered deftly back to earth. "There was no anti-aircraft fire, right? No interceptors flyin' round last night." "Nope. Heck, there's no people around here in a space bigger than Delaware." The neuter looked up. "So what do you figure, Pete?" "I figure an accident," said Pete. "A what?" "An accident. A lot can go wrong with a covert HALO insertion." "Like what, for instance?" "Well, G-loads and stuff. System malfunctions. Maybe he just blacked out." "He was a federal military spook, and you're telling me he passed out?" Katrinko daintily adjusted her goggled spex with gloved and bulbous fingertips. "Why would that matter anyway? He wouldn't fly a spacecraft with his own hands, would he?" Pete rubbed at the gummy line of his mask, easing the prickly indentation across one dark, tattooed

cheek. "I kinda figure he would, actually. The man was a pilot. Big military prestige thing. Flyin' in by hand, deep in Sphere territory, covert insertion, way behind enemy lines.... That'd really be something to brag about, back on the Potomac." The neuter considered this sour news without apparent resentment. As one of the world's top technical climbers, Katrinko was a great connoisseur of pointless displays of dangerous physical skill. "I can get behind that." She paused. "Serious bad break, though." They resealed their masks. Water was their greatest lack, and vapor exhalation was a problem. They were recycling body-water inside their suits, topped off with a few extra cc's they'd obtained from occasional patches of frost. They'd consumed the last of the trail-goop and candy from their glider shipment three long days ago. They hadn't eaten since. Still, Pete and Katrinko were getting along pretty well, living off big subcutaneous lumps of injected body fat. More through habit than apparent need, Pete and Katrinko segued into evidence-removal mode. It wasn't hard to conceal a HALO stealth pod. The spy-craft was radar-transparent and totally biodegradable. In the bitter wind and cold of the Taklamakan, the bigger chunks of wreckage had already gone all brown and crispy, like the shed husks of locusts. They couldn't scrape up every physical trace, but they'd surely get enough to fool aerial surveillance. The Lieutenant Colonel was extremely dead. He'd come down from the heavens in his full NAFTA military power-armor, a leaping, brick-busting, lightning-spewing exoskeleton, all acronyms and input jacks. It was powerful, elaborate gear, of an entirely different order than the gooey and fibrous street tech of the two urban intrusion freaks. But the high-impact crash had not been kind to the armored suit. It had been crueler still to the bone, blood, and tendon housed inside. Pete bagged the larger pieces with a heavy heart. He knew that the Lieutenant Colonel was basically no good: deceitful, ruthlessly ambitious, probably crazy. Still, Pete sincerely regretted his employer's demise. After all, it was precisely those qualities that had led the Lieutenant Colonel to recruit Spider Pete in the first place. Pete also felt sincere regret for the gung-ho, clear-eyed young military widow, and the two little redheaded kids in Augusta, Georgia. He'd never actually met the widow or the little kids, but the Lieutenant Colonel was always fussing about them and showing off their photos. The Lieutenant Colonel had been a full fifteen years younger than Spider Pete, a rosy-cheeked cracker kid really, never happier than when handing over wads of money, nutty orders, and expensive covert equipment to people whom no sane man would trust with a burnt-out match. And now here he was in the cold and empty heart of Asia, turned to jam within his shards of junk. Katrinko did the last of the search-and-retrieval while Pete dug beneath a ledge with his diamond hand-pick, the razored edges slashing out clods of shale. After she'd fetched the last blackened chunk of their employer, Katrinko perched birdlike on a nearby rock. She thoughtfully nibbled a piece of the pod's navigation console. "This gelbrain is good when it dries out, man. Like trail mix, or a fortune cookie."

Pete grunted. "You might be eating part of him, y'know." "Lotta good carbs and protein there, too." They stuffed a final shattered power-jackboot inside the Colonel's makeshift cairn. The piled rock was there for the ages. A few jets of webbing and thumbnail dabs of epoxy made it harder than a brick wall. It was noon now, still well below freezing, but as warm as the Taklamakan was likely to get in January. Pete sighed, dusted sand from his knees and elbows, stretched. It was hard work, cleaning up; the hardest part of intrusion work, because it was the stuff you had to do after the thrill was gone. He offered Katrinko the end of a fiber-optic cable, so that they could speak together without using radio or removing their masks. Pete waited until she had linked in, then spoke into his mike. "So we head on back to the glider now, right?" The neuter looked up, surprised. "How come?" "Look, Trink, this guy that we just buried was the actual spy in this assignment. You and me, we were just his gophers and backup support. The mission's an abort." "But we're searching for a giant, secret, rocket base." "Yeah, sure we are." "We're supposed to find this monster high-tech complex, break in, and record all kinds of crazy top secrets that nobody but the mandarins have ever seen. That's a totally hot assignment, man." Pete sighed. "I admit it's very high-concept, but I'm an old guy now, Trink. I need the kind of payoff that involves some actual money." Katrinko laughed. "But Pete! It's a starship! A whole fleet of 'em, maybe! Secretly built in the desert, by Chinese spooks and Japanese engineers!" Pete shook his head. "That was all paranoid bullshit that the flyboy made up, to get himself a grant and a field assignment. He was tired of sitting behind a desk in the basement, that's all." Katrinko folded her lithe and wiry arms. "Look, Pete, you saw those briefings just like me. You saw all those satellite shots. The traffic analysis, too. The Sphere people are up to something way big out here." Pete gazed around him. He found it painfully surreal to endure this discussion amid a vast and threatening tableau of dust-hazed sky and sand-etched mudstone gullies. "They built something big here once, I grant you that. But I never figured the Colonel's story for being very likely." "What's so unlikely about it? The Russians had a secret rocket base in the desert a hundred years ago. American deserts are full of secret mil-spec stuff and space-launch bases. So now the Asian Sphere people are up to the same old game. It all makes sense." "No, it makes no sense at all. Nobody's space-racing to build any starships. Starships aren't a space race. It takes four hundred years to fly to the stars. Nobody's gonna finance a major military project

that'll take four hundred years to pay off. Least of all a bunch of smart and thrifty Asian economic-warfare people." "Well, they're sure building something. Look, all we have to do is find the complex, break in, and document some stuff. We can do that! People like us, we never needed any federal bossman to help us break into buildings and take photos. That's what we always do, that's what we live for." Pete was touched by the kid's game spirit. She really had the City Spider way of mind. Nevertheless, Pete was fifty-two years old, so he found it necessary to at least try to be reasonable. "We should haul our sorry spook asses back to that glider right now. Let's skip on back over the Himalayas. We can fly on back to Washington, tourist class out of Delhi. They'll debrief us at the puzzle-palace. We'll give 'em the bad news about the bossman. We got plenty of evidence to prove that, anyhow.... The spooks will give us some walkin' money for a busted job, and tell us to keep our noses clean. Then we can go out for some pork chops." Katrinko's thin shoulders hunched mulishly within the bubblepak warts of her insulated camou. She was not taking this at all well. "Peter, I ain't looking for pork chops. I'm looking for some professional validation, okay? I'm sick of that lowlife kid stuff, knocking around raiding network sites and mayors' offices.... This is my chance at the big-time!" Pete stroked the muzzle of his mask with two gloved fingers. "Pete, I know that you ain't happy. I know that already, okay? But you've already made it in the big-time, Mr. City Spider, Mr. Legend, Mr. Champion. Now here's my big chance come along, and you want us to hang up our cleats." Pete raised his other hand. "Wait a minute, I never said that." "Well, you're tellin' me you're walking. You're turning your back. You don't even want to check it out first." "No," Pete said weightily, "I reckon you know me too well for that, Trink. I'm still a Spider. I'm still game. I'll always at least check it out." *** Katrinko set their pace after that. Pete was content to let her lead. It was a very stupid idea to continue the mission without the overlordship of the Lieutenant Colonel. But it was stupid in a different and more refreshing way than the stupid idea of returning home to Chattanooga. People in Pete's line of work weren't allowed to go home. He'd tried that once, really tried it, eight years ago, just after that badly busted caper in Brussels. He'd gotten a straight job at Lyle Schweik's pedal-powered aircraft factory. The millionaire sports tycoon had owed him a favor. Schweik had been pretty good about it, considering. But word had swiftly gotten around that Pete had once been a champion City Spider. Dumb-ass co-workers would make significant remarks. Sometimes they asked him for so-called favors, or tried to act street-wise. When you came down to it, straight people were a major pain in the ass.

Pete preferred the company of seriously twisted people. People who really cared about something, cared enough about it to really warp themselves for it. People who looked for more out of life than mommy-daddy, money, and the grave. Below the edge of a ridgeline they paused for a recce. Pete whirled a tethered eye on the end of its reel and flung it. At the peak of its arc, six stories up, it recorded their surroundings in a panoramic view. Pete and Katrinko studied the image together through their linked spex. Katrinko highlit an area downhill with a fingertip gesture. "Now there's a tipoff." "That gully, you mean?" "You need to get outdoors more, Pete. That's what we rockjocks technically call a road." Pete and Katrinko approached the road with professional caution. It was a paved ribbon of macerated cinderblock, overrun with drifting sand. The road was made of the coked-out clinker left behind by big urban incinerators, a substance that Asians used for their road surfaces because all the value had been cooked out of it. The cinder road had once seen a great deal of traffic. There were tire-shreds here and there, deep ruts in the shoulder, and post-holes that had once been traffic signs, or maybe surveillance boxes. They followed the road from a respectful distance, cautious of monitors, tripwires, landmines, and many other possible unpleasantries. They stopped for a rest in a savage arroyo where a road bridge had been carefully removed, leaving only neat sockets in the roadbed and a kind of conceptual arc in midair. "What creeps me out is how clean this all is," Pete said over cable. "It's a road, right? Somebody's gotta throw out a beer can, a lost shoe, something." Katrinko nodded. "I figure construction robots." "Really." Katrinko spread her swollen-fingered gloves. "It's a Sphere operation, so it's bound to have lots of robots, right? I figure robots built this road. Robots used this road. Robots carried in tons and tons of whatever they were carrying. Then when they were done with the big project, the robots carried off everything that was worth any money. Gathered up the guideposts, bridges everything. Very neat, no loose ends, very Sphere-type way to work." Katrinko set her masked chin on her bent knees, gone into reverie. "Some very weird and intense stuff can happen, when you got a lot of space in the desert, and robot labor that's too cheap to meter." Katrinko hadn't been wasting her time in those intelligence briefings. Pete had seen a lot of City Spider wannabes, even trained quite a few of them. But Katrinko had what it took to be a genuine Spider champion: the desire, the physical talent, the ruthless dedication, and even the smarts. It was staying out of jails and morgues that was gonna be the tough part of Katrinko. "You're a big fan of the Sphere, aren't you, kid? You really like the way they operate." "Sure, I always liked Asians. Their food's a lot better than Europe's."

Pete took this in stride. NAFTA, Sphere, and Europe: the trilateral super-powers jostled about with the uneasy regularity of sunspots, periodically brewing storms in the proxy regimes of the South. During his fifty-plus years, Pete had seen the Asian Cooperation Sphere change its public image repeatedly, in a weird political rhythm. Exotic vacation spot on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Baffling alien threat on Mondays and Wednesdays. Major trading partner each day and every day, including weekends and holidays. At the current political moment, the Asian Cooperation Sphere was deep into its Inscrutable Menace mode, logging lots of grim media coverage as NAFTA's chief economic adversary. As far as Pete could figure it, this basically meant that a big crowd of goofy North American economists were trying to act really macho. Their major complaint was that the Sphere was selling NAFTA too many neat, cheap, well-made consumer goods. That was an extremely silly thing to get killed about. But people perished horribly for much stranger reasons than that. *** At sunset, Pete and Katrinko discovered the giant warning signs. They were titanic vertical plinths, all epoxy and clinker, much harder than granite. They were four stories tall, carefully rooted in bedrock, and painstakingly chiseled with menacing horned symbols and elaborate textual warnings in at least fifty different languages. English was language number three. "Radiation waste," Pete concluded, deftly reading the text through his spex, from two kilometers away. "This is a radiation waste dump. Plus, a nuclear test site. Old Red Chinese hydrogen bombs, way out in the Taklamakan desert." He paused thoughtfully. "You gotta hand it to 'em. They sure picked the right spot for the job." "No way!" Katrinko protested. "Giant stone warning signs, telling people not to trespass in this area? That's got to be a con-job." "Well, it would sure account for them using robots, and then destroying all the roads." "No, man. It's like— you wanna hide something big nowadays. You don't put a safe inside the wall any more, because hey, everybody's got magnetometers and sonic imaging and heat detection. So you hide your best stuff in the garbage." Pete scanned their surroundings on spex telephoto. They were lurking on a hillside above a playa, where the occasional gullywasher had spewed out a big alluvial fan of desert varnished grit and cobbles. Stuff was actually growing down there— squat leathery grasses with fat waxy blades like dead men's fingers. The evil vegetation didn't look like any kind of grass that Pete had ever seen. It struck him as the kind of grass that would blithely gobble up stray plutonium. "Trink, I like my explanations simple. I figure that so-called giant starship base for a giant radwaste dump." "Well, maybe," the neuter admitted. "But even if that's the truth, that's still news worth paying for. We might find some busted up barrels, or some badly managed fuel rods out there. That would be a big political embarrassment, right? Proof of that would be worth something." "Huh," said Pete, surprised. But it was true. Long experience had taught Pete that there were always useful secrets in other people's trash. "Is it worth glowin' in the dark for?"

"So what's the problem?" Katrinko said. "I ain't having kids. I fixed that a long time ago. And you've got enough kids already." "Maybe," Pete grumbled. Four kids by three different women. It had taken him a long sad time to learn that women who fell head-over-heels for footloose, sexy tough guys would fall repeatedly for pretty much any footloose, sexy tough guy. Katrinko was warming to the task at hand. "We can do this, man. We got our suits and our breathing masks, and we're not eating or drinking anything out here, so we're practically radiation-tight. So we camp way outside the dump tonight. Then before dawn we slip in, we check it out real quick, we take our pictures, we leave. Clean, classic intrusion job. Nobody living around here to stop us, no problem there. And then, we got something to show the spooks when we get home. Maybe something we can sell." Pete mulled this over. The prospect didn't sound all that bad. It was dirty work, but it would complete the mission. Also— this was the part he liked best— it would keep the Lieutenant Colonel's people from sending in some other poor guy. "Then, back to the glider?" "Then back to the glider." "Okay, good deal." *** Before dawn the next morning, they stoked themselves with athletic performance enhancers, brewed in the guts of certain gene-spliced ticks that they had kept hibernating in their armpits. Then they concealed their travel gear, and swarmed like ghosts up and over the great wall. They pierced a tiny hole through the roof of one of the dun-colored, half-buried containment hangars, and oozed a spy-eye through. Bombproofed ranks of barrel-shaped sarcophagi, solid glossy as polished granite. The big fused radwaste containers were each the size of a tanker truck. They sat there neatly-ranked in hermetic darkness, mute as sphinxes. They looked to be good for the next twenty thousand years. Pete liquefied and retrieved the gelcam, then re-sealed the tiny hole with rock putty. They skipped down the slope of the dusty roof. There were lots of lizard tracks in the sand drifts, piled at the rim of the dome. These healthy traces of lizard cheered Pete up considerably. They swarmed silently up and over the wall. Back uphill to the grotto where they'd stashed their gear. Then they removed their masks to talk again. Pete sat behind a boulder, enjoying the intrusion afterglow. "A cakewalk," he pronounced it. "A pleasure hike." His pulse was already normal again, and, to his joy, there were no suspicious aches under his caraco-acromial arch. "You gotta give them credit, those robots sure work neat."

Pete nodded. "Killer application for robots, your basic lethal waste gig." "I telephoto'ed that whole cantonment," said Katrinko, "and there's no water there. No towers, no plumbing, no wells. People can get along without a lot of stuff in the desert, but nobody lives without water. That place is stone dead. It was always dead." She paused. "It was all automated robot work from start to finish. You know what that means, Pete? It means no human being has ever seen that place before. Except for you and me." "Hey, then it's a first! We scored a first intrusion! That's just dandy," said Pete, pleased at the professional coup. He gazed across the cobbled plain at the walled cantonment, and pressed a last set of spex shots into his gelbrain archive. Two dozen enormous domes, built block by block by giant robots, acting with the dumb persistence of termites. The sprawling domes looked as if they'd congealed on the spot, their rims settling like molten taffy into the desert's little convexities and concavities. From a satellite view, the domes probably passed for natural features. "Let's not tarry, okay? I can kinda feel those X-ray fingers kinking my DNA." "Aw, you're not all worried about that, are you, Pete?" Pete laughed and shrugged. "Who cares? Job's over, kid. Back to the glider." "They do great stuff with gene damage nowadays, y'know. Kinda reweave you, down at the spook lab." "What, those military doctors? I don't wanna give them the excuse." The wind picked up. A series of abrupt and brutal gusts. Dry, and freezing, and peppered with stinging sand. Suddenly, a faint moan emanated from the cantonment. Distant lungs blowing the neck of a wine bottle. "What's that big weird noise?" demanded Katrinko, all alert interest. "Aw no," said Pete. "Dang." *** Steam was venting from a hole in the bottom of the thirteenth dome. They'd missed the hole earlier, because the rim of that dome was overgrown with big thriving thornbushes. The bushes would have been a tip-off in themselves, if the two of them had been feeling properly suspicious. In the immediate area, Pete and Katrinko swiftly discovered three dead men. The three men had hacked and chiseled their way through the containment dome— from the inside. They had wriggled through the long, narrow crevice they had cut, leaving much blood and skin. The first man had died just outside the dome, apparently from sheer exhaustion. After their Olympian effort, the two survivors had emerged to confront the sheer four-story walls. The remaining men had tried to climb the mighty wall with their handaxes, crude woven ropes, and

pig-iron pitons. It was a nothing wall for a pair of City Spiders with modern handwebs and pinpression cleats. Pete and Katrinko could have camped and eaten a watermelon on that wall. But it was a very serious wall for a pair of very weary men dressed in wool, leather, and homemade shoes. One of them had fallen from the wall, and had broken his back and leg. The last one had decided to stay to comfort his dying comrade, and it seemed he had frozen to death. The three men had been dead for many months, maybe over a year. Ants had been at work on them, and the fine salty dust of the Taklamakan, and the freeze-drying. Three desiccated Asian mummies, black hair and crooked teeth and wrinkled dusky skin, in their funny bloodstained clothes. Katrinko offered the cable lead, chattering through her mask. "Man, look at these shoes! Look at this shirt this guy's got— would you call this thing a shirt?" "What I would call this is three very brave climbers," Pete said. He tossed a tethered eye into the crevice that the men had cut. The inside of the thirteenth dome was a giant forest of monitors. Microwave antennas, mostly. The top of the dome wasn't sturdy sintered concrete like the others, it was some kind of radar-transparent plastic. Dark inside, like the other domes, and hermetically sealed— at least before the dead men had chewed and chopped their hole through the wall. No sign of any rad-waste around here. They discovered the little camp where the men had lived. Their bivouac. Three men, patiently chipping and chopping their way to freedom. Burning their last wicks and oil lamps, eating their last rations bite by bite, emptying their leather canteens and scraping for frost to drink. Surrounded all the time by a towering jungle of satellite relays and wavepipes. Pete found that scene very ugly. That was a very bad scene. That was the worst of it yet. *** Pete and Katrinko retrieved their full set of intrusion gear. They then broke in through the top of the dome, where the cutting was easiest. Once through, they sealed the hole behind themselves, but only lightly, in case they should need a rapid retreat. They lowered their haul bags to the stone floor, then rappelled down on their smart ropes. Once on ground level, they closed the escape tunnel with web and rubble, to stop the howling wind, and to keep contaminants at bay. With the hole sealed, it grew warmer in the dome. Warm, and moist. Dew was collecting on walls and floor. A very strange smell, too. A smell like smoke and old socks. Mice and spice. Soup and sewage. A cozy human reek from the depths of the earth. "The Lieutenant Colonel sure woulda have loved this," whispered Katrinko over cable, spexing out the towering machinery with her infrareds. "You put a clip of explosive ammo through here, and it sure would put a major crimp in somebody's automated gizmos." Pete figured their present situation for an excellent chance to get killed. Automated alarm systems were the deadliest aspect of his professional existence, somewhat tempered by the fact that smart and aggressive alarm systems frequently killed their owners. There was a basic engineering principle involved. Fancy, paranoid alarm systems went false-positive all the time: squirrels, dogs, wind, hail, earth tremors,

horny boyfriends who forgot the password.... They were smart, and they had their own agenda, and it made them troublesome. But if these machines were alarms, then they hadn't noticed a rather large hole painstakingly chopped in the side of their dome. The spars and transmitters looked bad, all patchy with long-accumulated rime and ice. A junkyard look, the definite smell of dead tech. So somebody had given up on these smart, expensive, paranoid alarms. Someone had gotten sick and tired of them, and shut them off. *** At the foot of a microwave tower, they found a rat-sized manhole chipped out, covered with a laced-down lid of sheep's hide. Pete dropped a spy-eye down, scoping out a machine-drilled shaft. The tunnel was wide enough to swallow a car, and it dropped down as straight as a plumb bob for farther than his eye's wiring could reach. Pete silently yanked a rusting pig-iron piton from the edge of the hole, and replaced it with a modern glue anchor. Then he whipped a smart-rope through and carefully tightened his harness. Katrinko began shaking with eagerness. "Pete, I am way hot for this. Lemme lead point." Pete clipped a crab into Katrinko's harness, and linked their spex through the fiber-optic embedded in the rope. Then he slapped the neuter's shoulder. "Get bold, kid." Katrinko flared out the webbing on her gripgloves, and dropped in feet-first. The would-be escapes had made a lot of use of cabling already present in the tunnel. There were ceramic staples embedded periodically, to hold the cabling snug against the stone. The climbers had scrabbled their way up from staple to staple, using ladder-runged bamboo poles and iron hooks. Katrinko stopped her descent and tied off. Pete sent their haulbags down. Then he dropped and slithered after her. He stopped at the lead chock, tied off, and let Katrinko take lead again, following her progress with the spex. An eerie glow shone at the bottom of the tunnel. Pay day. Pete felt a familiar transcendental tension overcome him. It surged through him with mad intensity. Fear, curiosity, and desire: the raw, hot, thieving thrill of a major-league intrusion. A feeling like being insane, but so much better than craziness, because now he felt so awake. Pete was awash in primal spiderness, cravings too deep and slippery to speak about. The light grew hotter in Pete's infrareds. Below them was a slotted expanse of metal, gleaming like a kitchen sink, louvers with hot slots of light. Katrinko planted a foamchock in the tunnel wall, tied off, leaned back, and dropped a spy eye through the slot. Pete's hands were too busy to reach his spex. "What do you see?" he hissed over cable. Katrinko craned her head back, gloved palms pressing the goggles against her face. "I can see everything, man! Gardens of Eden, and cities of gold!"

*** The cave had been ancient solid rock once, a continental bulk. The rock had been pierced by a Russian-made drilling rig. A dry well, in a very dry country. And then some very weary, and very sunburned, and very determined Chinese Communist weapons engineers had installed a one-hundred-megaton hydrogen bomb at the bottom of their dry hole. When their beast in its nest of layered casings achieved fusion, seismographs jumped like startled fawns in distant California. The thermonuclear explosion had left a giant gasbubble at the heart of a crazy webwork of faults and cracks. The deep and empty bubble had lurked beneath the desert in utter and terrible silence, for ninety years. Then Asia's new masters had sent in new and more sophisticated agencies. Pete saw that the distant sloping walls of the cavern were daubed with starlight. White constellations, whole and entire. And amid the space— that giant and sweetly damp airspace— were three great glowing lozenges, three vertical cylinders the size of urban high rises. They seemed to be suspended in midair. "Starships," Pete muttered. "Starships," Katrinko agreed. Menus appeared in the shared visual space of their linked spex. Katrinko's fingertip sketched out a set of tiny moving sparks against the walls. "But check that out." "What are those?" "Heat signatures. Little engines." The envisioned world wheeled silently. "And check out over here too— and crawlin' around deep in there, dozens of the things. And Pete, see these? Those big ones? Kinda on patrol?" "Robots." "Yep." "What the hell are they up to, down here?" "Well, I figure it this way, man. If you're inside one of those fake starships, and you look out through those windows— those portholes, I guess we call 'em— you can't see anything but shiny stars. Deep space. But with spex, we can see right through all that business. And Pete, that whole stone sky down there is crawling with machinery." "Man oh man." "And nobody inside those starships can see down, man. There is a whole lot of very major weirdness going on down at the bottom of that cave. There's a lot of hot steamy water down there, deep in those rocks and those cracks." "Water, or a big smelly soup maybe," Pete said. "A chemical soup."

"Biochemical soup." "Autonomous self-assembly proteinaceous biotech. Strictly forbidden by the Nonproliferation Protocols of the Manila Accords of 2037," said Pete. Pete rattled off this phrase with practiced ease, having rehearsed it any number of times during various background briefings. "A whole big lake of way-hot, way-illegal, self-assembling goo down there." "Yep. The very stuff that our covert-tech boys have been messing with under the Rockies for the past ten years." "Aw, Pete, everybody cheats a little bit on the accords. The way we do it in NAFTA, it's no worse than bathtub gin. But this is huge! And Lord only know what's inside those starships." "Gotta be people, kid." "Yep." Pete drew a slow moist breath. "This is a big one, Trink. This is truly major-league. You and me, we got ourselves an intelligence coup here of historic proportions." "If you're trying to say that we should go back to the glider now," Katrinko said, "don't even start with me." "We need to go back to the glider," Pete insisted, "with the photographic proof that we got right now. That was our mission objective. It's what they pay us for." "Whoop-tee-do." "Besides, it's the patriotic thing. Right?" "Maybe I'd play the patriot game, if I was in uniform," said Katrinko. "But the Army don't allow neuters. I'm a total freak and I'm a free agent, and I didn't come here to see Shangri-La and then turn around first thing." "Yeah," Pete admitted. "I really know that feeling." "I'm going down in there right now," Katrinko said. "You belay for me?" "No way, kid. This time, I'm leading point." *** Pete eased himself through a crudely broken louver and out onto the vast rocky ceiling. Pete had never much liked climbing rock. Nasty stuff, rock— all natural, no guaranteed engineering specifications. Still, Pete had spent a great deal of his life on ceilings. Ceilings he understood. He worked his way out on a series of congealed lava knobs, till he hit a nice solid crack. He did a rapid

set of fist-jams, then set a pair of foam-clamps, and tied himself off on anchor. Pete panned slowly in place, upside down on the ceiling, muffled in his camou gear, scanning methodically for the sake of Katrinko back on the fiber-optic spex link. Large sections of the ceiling looked weirdly worm-eaten, as if drills or acids had etched the rock away. Pete could discern in the eerie glow of infrared that the three fake starships were actually supported on columns. Huge hollow tubes, lacelike and almost entirely invisible, made of something black and impossibly strong, maybe carbon-fiber. There were water pipes inside the columns, and electrical power. Those columns were the quickest and easiest ways to climb down or up to the starships. Those columns were also very exposed. They looked like excellent places to get killed. Pete knew that he was safely invisible to any naked human eye, but there wasn't much he could do about his heat signature. For all he knew, at this moment he was glowing like a Christmas tree on the sensors of a thousand heavily armed robots. But you couldn't leave a thousand machines armed to a hair-trigger for years on end. And who would program them to spend their time watching ceilings? The muscular burn had faded from his back and shoulders. Pete shook a little extra blood through his wrists, unhooked, and took off on cleats and gripwebs. He veered around one of the fake stars, a great glowing glassine bulb the size of a laundry basket. The fake star was cemented into a big rocky wart, and it radiated a cold, enchanting, and gooey firefly light. Pete was so intrigued by this bold deception that his cleat missed a smear. His left foot swung loose. His left shoulder emitted a nasty-feeling, expensive-sounding pop. Pete grunted, planted both cleats, and slapped up a glue patch, with tendons smarting and the old forearm clock ticking fast. He whipped a crab through the patchloop and sagged within his harness, breathing hard. On the surface of his spex, Katrinko's glowing fingertip whipped across the field of Pete's vision, and pointed. Something moving out there. Pete had company. Pete eased a string of flashbangs from his sleeve. Then he hunkered down in place, trusting to his camouflage, and watching. A robot was moving toward him among the dark pits of the fake stars. Wobbling and jittering. Pete had never seen any device remotely akin to this robot. It had a porous, foamy hide, like cork and plastic. It had a blind compartmented knob for a head, and fourteen long fibrous legs like a frayed mess of used rope, terminating in absurdly complicated feet, like a boxful of grip pliers. Hanging upside down from bits of rocky irregularity too small to see, it would open its big warty head and flick out a forked sensor like a snake's tongue. Sometimes it would dip itself close to the ceiling, for a lingering chemical smooch on the surface of the rock. Pete watched with murderous patience as the device backed away, drew nearer, spun around a bit, meandered a little closer, sucked some more ceiling rock, made up its mind about something, replanted its big grippy feet, hoofed along closer yet, lost its train of thought, retreated a bit, sniffed the air at length, sucked meditatively on the end of one of its ropy tentacles. It finally reached him, walked deftly over his legs, and dipped up to lick enthusiastically at the chemical traces left by his gripweb. The robot seemed enchanted by the taste of the glove's elastomer against the rock. It hung there on its fourteen plier feet, loudly licking and rasping.

Pete lashed out with his pick. The razored point slid with a sullen crunch right through the thing's corky head. It went limp instantly, pinned there against the ceiling. Then with a nasty rustling it deployed a whole unsuspected set of waxy and filmy appurtenances. Complex bug-tongue things, mandible scrapers, delicate little spatulas, all reeling and trembling out of its slotted underside. It was not going to die. It couldn't die, because it had never been alive. It was a piece of biotechnical machinery. Dying was simply not on its agenda anywhere. Pete photographed the device carefully as it struggled with obscene mechanical stupidity to come to workable terms with its new environmental parameters. Then Pete levered the pick loose from the ceiling, shook it loose, and dropped the pierced robot straight down to hell. Pete climbed more quickly now, favoring the strained shoulder. He worked his way methodically out to the relative ease of the vertical wall, where he discovered a large mined-out vein in the constellation Sagittarius. The vein was a big snaky recess where some kind of ore had been nibbled and strained from the rock. By the look of it, the rock had been chewed away by a termite host of tiny robots with mouths like toenail clippers. He signaled on the spex for Katrinko. The neuter followed along the clipped and anchored line, climbing like a fiend while lugging one of the haulbags. As Katrinko settled in to their new base camp, Pete returned to the louvers to fetch the second bag. When he'd finally heaved and grappled his way back, his shoulder was aching bitterly and his nerves were shot. They were done for the day. Katrinko had put up the emission-free encystment web at the mouth of their crevice. With Pete returned to relative safety, she reeled in their smart-ropes and fed them a handful of sugar. Pete cracked open two capsules of instant fluff, then sank back gratefully into the wool. Katrinko took off her mask. She was vibrating with alert enthusiasm. Youth, thought Pete— youth, and the 8 percent metabolic advantage that came from lacking sex organs. "We're in so much trouble now," Katrinko whispered, with a feverish grin in the faint red glow of a single indicator light. She no longer resembled a boy or a young woman. Katrinko looked completely diabolical. This was a nonsexed creature. Pete liked to think of her as a "she," because this was somehow easier on his mind, but Katrinko was an "it." Now it was filled with glee, because finally it had placed itself in a proper and pleasing situation. Stark and feral confrontation with its own stark and feral little being. "Yeah, this is trouble," Pete said. He placed a fat medicated tick onto the vein inside of his elbow. "And you're taking first watch." *** Pete woke four hours later, with a heart-fluttering rise from the stunned depths of chemically assisted delta-sleep. He felt numb, and lightly dusted with a brain-clouding amnesia, as if he'd slept for four straight days. He had been profoundly helpless in the grip of the drug, but the risk had been worth it, because now he was thoroughly rested. Pete sat up, and tried the left shoulder experimentally. It was much improved.

Pete rubbed feeling back into his stubbled face and scalp, then strapped his spex on. He discovered Katrinko squatting on her haunches, in the radiant glow of her own body heat, pondering over an ugly mess of spines, flakes, and goo. Pete touched spex knobs and leaned forward. "What you got there?" "Dead robots. They ate our foamchocks, right out of the ceiling. They eat anything. I killed the ones that tried to break into camp." Katrinko stroked at a midair menu, then handed Pete a fiber lead for his spex. "Check this footage I took." Katrinko had been keeping watch with the gelcams, picking out passing robots in the glow of their engine heat. She'd documented them on infrared, saving and editing the clearest live-action footage. "These little ones with the ball-shaped feet, I call them keets," she narrated, as the captured frames cascaded across Pete's spex-clad gaze. "They're small, but they're really fast, and all over the place— I had to kill three of them. This one with the sharp spiral nose is a drillet. Those are a pair of dubits. The dubits always travel in pairs. This big thing here, that looks like a spilled dessert with big eyes and a ball on a chain, I call that one a lurchen. Because of the way it moves, see? It's sure a lot faster than it looks." Katrinko stopped the spex replay, switched back to live perception, and poked carefully at the broken litter before her booted feet. The biggest device in the heap resembled a dissected cat's head stuffed with cables and bristles. "I also killed this piteen. Piteens don't die easy, man." "There's lots of these things?" "I figure hundreds, maybe thousands. All different kinds. And every one of 'em as stupid as dirt. Or else we'd be dead and disassembled a hundred times already." Pete stared at the dissected robots, a cooling mass of nerve-netting, batteries, veiny armor plates, and gelatin. "Why do they look so crazy?" "Cause they grew all by themselves. Nobody ever designed them." Katrinko glanced up. "You remember those big virtual spaces for weapons design, that they run out in Alamagordo?" "Yeah, sure, Alamagordo. Physics simulations on those super-size quantum gel-brains. Huge virtualities, with ultra-fast, ultra-fine detail. You bet I remember New Mexico! I love to raid a great computer lab. There's something so traditional about the hack." "Yeah. See, for us NAFTA types, physics virtualities are a military app. We always give our tech to the military whenever it looks really dangerous. But let's say you don't share our NAFTA values. You don't wanna test new weapons systems inside giant virtualities. Let's say you want to make a can-opener, instead." During her sleepless hours huddling on watch, Katrinko had clearly been giving this matter a lot of thought. "Well, you could study other people's can-openers and try to improve the design. Or else you could just set up a giant high-powered virtuality with a bunch of virtual cans inside it. Then you make some can-opener simulations, that are basically blobs of goo. They're simulated goo, but they're also programs, and those programs trade data and evolve. Whenever they pierce a can, you reward them by making more copies of them. You're running, like, a million generations of a million different possible can-openers, all day every day, in a simulated space."

The concept was not entirely alien to Spider Pete. "Yeah, I've heard the rumors. It was one of those stunts like Artificial Intelligence. It might look really good on paper, but you can't ever get it to work in real life." "Yeah, and now it's illegal too. Kinda hard to police, though. But let's imagine you're into economic warfare and you figure out how to do this. Finally, you evolve this super weird, super can-opener that no human being could ever have invented. Something that no human being could even imagine. Because it grew like a mushroom in an entire alternate physics. But you have all the specs for its shape and proportions, right there in the supercomputer. So to make one inside the real world, you just print it out like a photograph. And it works! It runs! See? Instant cheap consumer goods." Pete thought it over. "So you're saying the Sphere people got that idea to work, and these robots here were built that way?" "Pete, I just can't figure any other way this could have happened. These machines are just too alien. They had to come from some totally nonhuman, autonomous process. Even the best Japanese engineers can't design a jelly robot made out of fuzz and rope that can move like a caterpillar. There's not enough money in the world to pay human brains to think that out." Pete prodded at the gooey ruins with his pick. "Well, you got that right." "Whoever built this place, they broke a lot of rules and treaties. But they did it all really cheap. They did it in a way that is so cheap that it is beyond economics." Katrinko thought this over. "It's way beyond economics, and that's exactly why it's against all those rules and the treaties in the first place." "Fast, cheap, and out of control." "Exactly, man. If this stuff ever got loose in the real world, it would mean the end of everything we know." Pete liked this last statement not at all. He had always disliked apocalyptic hype. He liked it even less now because under these extreme circumstances it sounded very plausible. The Sphere had the youngest and the biggest population of the three major trading blocs, and the youngest and the biggest ideas. People in Asia knew how to get things done. "Y'know, Lyle Schweik once told me that the weirdest bicycles in the world come out of China these days." "Well, he's right. They do. And what about those Chinese circuitry chips they've been dumping in the NAFTA markets lately? Those chips are dirt cheap and work fine, but they're full of all this crazy leftover wiring that doubles back and gets all snarled up.... I always thought that was just shoddy workmanship. Man, 'workmanship' had nothing to do with those chips." Pete nodded soberly. "Okay. Chips and bicycles, that much I can understand. There's a lot of money in that. But who the heck would take the trouble to create a giant hole in the ground that's full of robots and fake stars? I mean, why?" Katrinko shrugged. "I guess it's just the Sphere, man. They still do stuff just because it's wonderful." ***

The bottom of the world was boiling over. During the passing century, the nuclear test cavity had accumulated its own little desert aquifer, a pitch-black subterranean oasis. The bottom of the bubble was an unearthly drowned maze of shattered cracks and chemical deposition, all turned to simmering tidepools of mechanical self-assemblage. Oxygen-fizzing geysers of black fungus tea. Steam rose steadily in the darkness amid the crags, rising to condense and run in chilly rivulets down the spherical star-spangled walls. Down at the bottom, all the water was eagerly collected by aberrant devices of animated sponge and string. Katrinko instantly tagged these as "smits" and "fuzzens." The smits and fuzzens were nightmare dishrags and piston-powered spaghetti, leaping and slopping wetly from crag to crag. Katrinko took an unexpected ease and pleasure in naming and photographing the machines. Speculation boiled with sinister ease from the sexless youngster's vulpine head, a swift off-the-cuff adjustment to this alien toy world. It would seem that the kid lived rather closer to the future than Pete did. They cranked their way from boulder to boulder, crack to liquid crack. They documented fresh robot larvae, chewing their way to the freedom of darkness through plugs of goo and muslin. It was a whole miniature creation, designed in the senseless gooey cores of a Chinese supercomputing gelbrain, and transmuted into reality in a hot broth of undead mechanized protein. This was by far the most amazing phenomenon that Pete had ever witnessed. Pete was accordingly plunged into gloom. Knowledge was power in his world. He knew with leaden certainty that he was taking on far too much voltage for his own good. Pete was a professional. He could imagine stealing classified military secrets from a superpower, and surviving that experience. It would be very risky, but in the final analysis it was just the military. A rocket base, for instance— a secret Asian rocket base might have been a lot of fun. But this was not military. This was an entire new means of industrial production. Pete knew with instinctive street-level certainty that tech of this level of revolutionary weirdness was not a spy thing, a sports thing, or a soldier thing. This was a big, big money thing. He might survive discovering it. He'd never get away with revealing it. The thrilling wonder of it all really bugged him. Thrilling wonder was at best a passing thing. The sober implications for the longer term weighed on Pete's soul like a damp towel. He could imagine escaping this place in one piece, but he couldn't imagine any plausible aftermath for handing over nifty photographs of thrilling wonder to military spooks on the Potomac. He couldn't imagine what the powers-that-were would do with that knowledge. He rather dreaded what they would do to him for giving it to them. Pete wiped a sauna cascade of sweat from his neck. "So I figure it's either geothermal power, or a fusion generator down there," said Katrinko. "I'd be betting thermonuclear, given the circumstances." The rocks below their busy cleats were a-skitter with bugs: gippers and ghents and kebbits, dismantlers and glue-spreaders and brain-eating carrion disassemblers. They were profoundly dumb little devices, specialized as centipedes. They didn't seem very aggressive, but it surely would be a lethal mistake to sit down among them. A barnacle thing with an iris mouth and long whipping eyes took a careful taste of Katrinko's boot. She retreated to a crag with a yelp.

"Wear your mask," Pete chided. The damp heat was bliss after the skin-eating chill of the Taklamakan, but most of the vents and cracks were spewing thick smells of hot beef stew and burnt rubber, all varieties of eldritch mechano-metabolic byproduct. His lungs felt sore at the very thought of it. Pete cast his foggy spex up the nearest of the carbon-fiber columns, and the golden, glowing, impossibly tempting lights of those starship portholes up above. *** Katrinko led point. She was pitilessly exposed against the lacelike girders. They didn't want to risk exposure during two trips, so they each carried a haul bag. The climb went well at first. Then a machine rose up from wet darkness like a six-winged dragonfly. Its stinging tail lashed through the thready column like the kick of a mule. It connected brutally. Katrinko shot backwards from the impact, tumbled ten meters, and dangled like a ragdoll from her last backup chock. The flying creature circled in a figure eight, attempting to make up its nonexistent mind. Then a slower but much larger creature writhed and fluttered out of the starry sky, and attacked Katrinko's dangling haulbag. The bag burst like a Christmas piñata in a churning array of taloned wings. A fabulous cascade of expensive spy gear splashed down to the hot pools below. Katrinko twitched feebly at the end of her rope. The dragonfly, cruelly alerted, went for her movement. Pete launched a string of flashbangs. The world erupted in flash, heat, concussion, and flying chaff. Impossibly hot and loud, a thunderstorm in a closet. The best kind of disappearance magic: total overwhelming distraction, the only real magic in the world. Pete soared up to Katrinko like a balloon on a bungee-cord. When he reached the bottom of the starship, twenty-seven heart-pounding seconds later, he had burned out both the smart-ropes. The silvery rain of chaff was driving the bugs to mania. The bottom of the cavern was suddenly a-crawl with leaping mechanical heat-ghosts, an instant menagerie of skippers and humpers and floppers. At the rim of perception, there were new things rising from the depths of the pools, vast and scaly, like golden carp to a rain of fish chow. Pete's own haulbag had been abandoned at the base of the column. That bag was clearly not long for this world. Katrinko came to with a sudden winded gasp. They began free-climbing the outside of the starship. It surface was stony, rough and uneven, something like pumice, or wasp spit. They found the underside of a monster porthole and pressed themselves flat against the surface. There they waited, inert and unmoving, for an hour. Katrinko caught her breath. Her ribs stopped bleeding. The two of them waited for another hour, while crawling and flying heat-ghosts nosed furiously around their little world, following the tatters of their programming. They waited a third hour.

Finally they were joined in their haven by an oblivious gang of machines with suckery skirts and wheelbarrows for heads. The robots chose a declivity and began filling it with big mandible trowels of stony mortar, slopping it on and jaw-chiseling it into place, smoothing everything over, tireless and pitiless. Pete seized this opportunity to attempt to salvage their lost equipment. There had been such fabulous federal bounty in there: smart audio bugs, heavy-duty gelcams, sensors and detectors, pulleys, crampons and latches, priceless vials of programmed neural goo.... Pete crept back to the bottom of the spacecraft. Everything was long gone. Even the depleted smart-ropes had been eaten, by a long trail of foraging keets. The little machines were still squirreling about in the black lace of the column, sniffing and scraping at the last molecular traces, with every appearance of satisfaction. Pete rejoined Katrinko, and woke her where she clung rigid and stupefied to her hiding spot. They inched their way around the curved rim of the starship hull, hunting for a possible weakness. They were in very deep trouble now, for their best equipment was gone. It didn't matter. Their course was very obvious now, and the loss of alternatives had clarified Pete's mind. He was consumed with a burning desire to break in. Pete slithered into the faint shelter of a large, deeply pitted hump. There he discovered a mess of braided rope. The rope was woven of dead and mashed organic fibers, something like the hair at the bottom of a sink. The rope had gone all petrified under a stony lacquer of robot spit. These were climber's ropes. Someone had broken out here— smashed through the hull of the ship, from the inside. The robots had come to repair the damage, carefully resealing the exit hole, and leaving this ugly hump of stony scar tissue. Pete pulled his gelcam drill. He had lost the sugar reserves along with the haulbags. Without sugar to metabolize, the little enzyme-driven rotor would starve and be useless soon. That fact could not be helped. Pete pressed the device against the hull, waited as it punched its way through, and squirted in a gelcam to follow. He saw a farm. Pete could scarcely have been more astonished. It was certainly farmland, though. Cute, toy farmland, all under a stony blue ceiling, crisscrossed with hot grids of radiant light, embraced in the stony arch of the enclosing hull. There were fishponds with reeds. Ditches, and a wooden irrigation wheel. A little bridge of bamboo. There were hairy melon vines in rich black soil and neat, entirely weedless fields of dwarfed red grain. Not a soul in sight. Katrinko crept up and linked in on cable. "So where is everybody?" Pete said. "They're all at the portholes," said Katrinko, coughing. "What?" said Pete, surprised. "Why?" "Because of those flashbangs," Katrinko wheezed. Her battered ribs were still paining her. "They're all at the portholes, looking out into the darkness. Waiting for something else to happen." "But we did that stuff hours ago."

"It was very big news, man. Nothing ever happens in there." Pete nodded, fired with resolve. "Well then. We're breakin' in." Katrinko was way game. "Gonna use caps?" "Too obvious." "Acids and fibrillators?" "Lost 'em in the haulbags." "Well, that leaves cheesewires," Katrinko concluded. "I got two." "I got six." Katrinko nodded in delight. "Six cheesewires! You're loaded for bear, man!" "I love cheesewires," Pete grunted. He had helped to invent them. Eight minutes and twelve seconds later they were inside the starship. They reset the cored-out plug behind them, delicately gluing it in place and carefully obscuring the hair-thin cuts. Katrinko sidestepped into a grove of bamboo. Her camou bloomed in green and tan and yellow, with such instant and treacherous ease that Pete lost her entirely. Then she waved, and the spex edge-detectors kicked in on her silhouette. Pete lifted his spex for a human naked-eye take on the situation. There was simply nothing there at all. Katrinko was gone, less than a ghost, like pitchforking mercury with your eyelashes. So they were safe now. They could glide through this bottled farm like a pair of bad dreams. *** They scanned the spacecraft from top to bottom, looking for dangerous and interesting phenomena. Control rooms manned by Asian space technicians maybe, or big lethal robots, or video monitors— something that might cramp their style or kill them. In the thirty-seven floors of the spacecraft, they found no such thing. The five thousand inhabitants spent their waking hours farming. The crew of the starship were preindustrial, tribal, Asian peasants. Men, women, old folks, little kids. The local peasants rose every single morning, as their hot networks of wiring came alive in the ceiling. They would milk their goats. They would feed their sheep, and some very odd, knee-high, dwarf Bactrian camels. They cut bamboo and netted their fishponds. They cut down tamarisks and poplar trees for firewood. They tended melon vines and grew plums and hemp. They brewed alcohol, and ground grain, and boiled millet, and squeezed cooking oil out of rapeseed. They made clothes out of hemp and raw wool and leather, and baskets out of reeds and straw. They ate a lot of carp.

And they raised a whole mess of chickens. Somebody not from around here had been fooling with the chickens. Apparently these were super space-chickens of some kind, leftover lab products from some serious long-term attempt to screw around with chicken DNA. The hens produced five or six lumpy eggs every day. The roosters were enormous, and all different colors, and very smelly, and distinctly reptilian. It was very quiet and peaceful inside the starship. The animals made their lowing and clucking noises, and the farm workers sang to themselves in the tiny round-edged fields, and the incessant foot-driven water pumps would clack rhythmically, but there were no city noises. No engines anywhere. No screens. No media. There was no money. There were a bunch of tribal elders who sat under the blossoming plum trees outside the big stone granaries. They messed with beads on wires, and wrote notes on slips of wood. Then the soldiers, or the cops— they were a bunch of kids in crude leather armor, with spears— would tramp in groups, up and down the dozens of stairs, on the dozens of floors. Marching like crazy, and requisitioning stuff, and carrying stuff on their backs, and handing things out to people. Basically spreading the wealth around. Most of the weird bearded old guys were palace accountants, but there were some others too. They sat cross-legged on mats in their homemade robes, and straw sandals, and their little spangly hats, discussing important matters at slow and extreme length. Sometimes they wrote stuff down on palm-leaves. Pete and Katrinko spent a special effort to spy on these old men in the spangled hats, because, after close study, they had concluded that this was the local government. They pretty much had to be the government. These old men with the starry hats were the only part of the population who weren't being worked to a frazzle. Pete and Katrinko found themselves a cozy spot on the roof of the granary, one of the few permanent structures inside the spacecraft. It never rained inside the starship, so there wasn't much call for roofs. Nobody ever trespassed up on the roof of the granary. It was clear that the very idea of doing this was beyond local imagination. So Pete and Katrinko stole some bamboo water jugs, and some lovely handmade carpets, and a lean-to tent, and set up camp there. Katrinko studied an especially elaborate palm-leaf book that she had filched from the local temple. There were pages and pages of dense alien script. "Man, what do you suppose these yokels have to write about?" "The way I figure it," said Pete, "they're writing down everything they can remember from the world outside." "Yeah?" "Yeah. Kinda building up an intelligence dossier for their little starship regime, see? Because that's all they'll ever know, because the people who put them inside here aren't giving 'em any news. And they're sure as hell never gonna let 'em out." Katrinko leafed carefully through the stiff and brittle pages of the handmade book. The people here spoke only one language. It was no language Pete or Katrinko could even begin to recognize. "Then this is their history. Right?"

"It's their lives, kid. Their past lives, back when they were still real people, in the big real world outside. Transistor radios, and shoulder-launched rockets. Barbed-wire, pacification campaigns, ID cards. Camel caravans coming in over the border, with mortars and explosives. And very advanced Sphere mandarin bosses, who just don't have the time to put up with armed, Asian, tribal fanatics." Katrinko looked up. "That kinda sounds like your version of the outside world, Pete." Pete shrugged. "Hey, it's what happens." "You suppose these guys really believe they're inside a real starship?" "I guess that depends on how much they learned from the guys who broke out of here with the picks and the ropes." Katrinko thought about it. "You know what's truly pathetic? The shabby illusion of all this. Some spook mandarin's crazy notion that ethnic separatists could be squeezed down tight, and spat out like watermelon seeds into interstellar space.... Man, what a come-on, what an enticement, what an empty promise!" "I could sell that idea," Pete said thoughtfully. "You know how far away the stars really are, kid? About four hundred years away, that's how far. You seriously want to get human beings to travel to another star, you gotta put human beings inside of a sealed can for four hundred solid years. But what are people supposed to do in there, all that time? The only thing they can do is quietly run a farm. Because that's what a starship is. It's a desert oasis." "So you want to try a dry-run starship experiment," said Katrinko. "And in the meantime, you happen to have some handy religious fanatics in the backwoods of Asia, who are shooting your ass off. Guys who refuse to change their age-old lives, even though you are very, very high-tech." "Yep. That's about the size of it. Means, motive, and opportunity." "I get it. But I can't believe that somebody went through with that scheme in real life. I mean, rounding up an ethnic minority, and sticking them down in some godforsaken hole, just so you'll never have to think about them again. That's just impossible!" "Did I ever tell you that my grandfather was a Seminole?" Pete said. Katrinko shook her head. "What's that mean?" "They were American tribal guys who ended up stuck in a swamp. The Florida Seminoles, they called 'em. Y'know, maybe they just called my grandfather a Seminole. He dressed really funny.... Maybe it just sounded good to call him a Seminole. Otherwise, he just would have been some strange, illiterate geezer." Katrinko's brow wrinkled. "Does it matter that your grandfather was a Seminole?" "I used to think it did. That's where I got my skin color— as if that matters, nowadays. I reckon it mattered plenty to my grandfather, though.... He was always stompin' and carryin' on about a lot of weird stuff we couldn't understand. His English was pretty bad. He was never around much when we needed him."

"Pete ..." Katrinko sighed. "I think it's time we got out of this place." "How come?" Pete said, surprised. "We're safe up here. The locals are not gonna hurt us. They can't even see us. They can't touch us. Hell, they can't even imagine us. With our fantastic tactical advantages, we're just like gods to these people." "I know all that, man. They're like the ultimate dumb straight people. I don't like them very much. They're not much of a challenge to us. In fact, they kind of creep me out." "No way! They're fascinating. Those baggy clothes, the acoustic songs, all that menial labor ... These people got something that we modern people just don't have any more." "Huh?" Katrinko said. "Like what, exactly?" "I dunno," Pete admitted. "Well, whatever it is, it can't be very important." Katrinko sighed. "We got some serious challenges on the agenda, man. We gotta sidestep our way past all those angry robots outside, then head up that shaft, then hoof it back, four days through a freezing desert, with no haulbags. All the way back to the glider." "But Trink, there are two other starships in here that we didn't break into yet. Don't you want to see those guys?" "What I'd like to see right now is a hot bath in a four-star hotel," said Katrinko. "And some very big international headlines, maybe. All about me. That would be lovely." She grinned. "But what about the people?" "Look, I'm not 'people,' " Katrinko said calmly. "Maybe it's because I'm a neuter, Pete, but I can tell you're way off the subject. These people are none of our business. Our business now is to return to our glider in an operational condition, so that we can complete our assigned mission, and return to base with our data. Okay?" "Well, let's break into just one more starship first." "We gotta move, Pete. We've lost our best equipment, and we're running low on body fat. This isn't something that we can kid about and live." "But we'll never come back here again. Somebody will, but it sure as heck won't be us. See, it's a Spider thing." Katrinko was weakening. "One more starship? Not both of 'em?" "Just one more." "Okay, good deal." ***

The hole they had cut through the starship's hull had been rapidly cemented by robots. It cost them two more cheesewires to cut themselves a new exit. Then Katrinko led point, up across the stony ceiling, and down the carbon column to the second ship. To avoid annoying the lurking robot guards, they moved with hypnotic slowness and excessive stealth. This made it a grueling trip. This second ship had seen hard use. The hull was extensively scarred with great wads of cement, entombing many lengths of dried and knotted rope. Pete and Katrinko found a weak spot and cut their way in. This starship was crowded. It was loud inside, and it smelled. The floors were crammed with hot and sticky little bazaars, where people sold handicrafts and liquor and food. Criminals were being punished by being publicly chained to posts and pelted with offal by passers-by. Big crowds of ragged men and tattooed women gathered around brutal cockfights, featuring spurred mutant chickens half the size of dogs. All the men carried knives. The architecture here was more elaborate, all kinds of warrens, and courtyards, and damp, sticky alleys. After exploring four floors, Katrinko suddenly declared that she recognized their surroundings. According to Katrinko, they were a physical replica of sets from a popular Japanese interactive samurai epic. Apparently the starship's designers had needed some preindustrial Asian village settings, and they hadn't wanted to take the expense and trouble to design them from scratch. So they had programmed their construction robots with pirated game designs. This starship had once been lavishly equipped with at least three hundred armed video camera installations. Apparently, the mandarins had come to the stunning realization that the mere fact that they were recording crime didn't mean that they could control it. Their spy cameras were all dead now. Most had been vandalized. Some had gone down fighting. They were all inert and abandoned. The rebellious locals had been very busy. After defeating the spy cameras, they had created a set of giant hullbreakers. These were siege engines, big crossbow torsion machines, made of hemp and wood and bamboo. The hullbreakers were starship community efforts, elaborately painted and ribboned, and presided over by tough, aggressive gang bosses with batons and big leather belts. Pete and Katrinko watched a labor gang, hard at work on one of the hullbreakers. Women braided rope ladders from hair and vegetable fiber, while smiths forged pitons over choking, hazy charcoal fires. It was clear from the evidence that these restive locals had broken out of their starship jail at least twenty times. Every time they had been corralled back in by the relentless efforts of mindless machines. Now they were busily preparing yet another breakout. "These guys sure have got initiative," said Pete admiringly. "Let's do 'em a little favor, okay?" "Yeah?" "Here they are, taking all this trouble to hammer their way out. But we still have a bunch of caps. We got no more use for 'em, after we leave this place. So the way I figure it, we blow their wall out big-time, and let a whole bunch of 'em loose at once. Then you and I can escape real easy in the confusion." Katrinko loved this idea, but had to play devil's advocate. "You really think we ought to interfere like that? That kind of shows our hand, doesn't it?"

"Nobody's watching any more," said Pete. "Some technocrat figured this for a big lab experiment. But they wrote these people off, or maybe they lost their anthropology grant. These people are totally forgotten. Let's give the poor bastards a show." Pete and Katrinko planted their explosives, took cover on the ceiling, and cheerfully watched the wall blow out. A violent gust of air came through as pressures equalized, carrying a hemorrhage of dust and leaves into interstellar space. The locals were totally astounded by the explosion, but when the repair robots showed up, they soon recovered their morale. A terrific battle broke out, a general vengeful frenzy of crab-bashing and sponge-skewering. Women and children tussled with the keets and bibbets. Soldiers in leather cuirasses fought with the bigger machines, deploying pikes, crossbow quarrels, and big robot-mashing mauls. The robots were profoundly stupid, but they were indifferent to their casualties, and entirely relentless. The locals made the most of their window of opportunity. They loaded a massive harpoon into a torsion catapult, and fired it into space. Their target was the neighboring starship, the third and last of them. The barbed spear bounded off the hull. So they reeled it back in on a monster bamboo hand-reel, cursing and shouting like maniacs. The starship's entire population poured into the fight. The walls and bulkheads shook with the tramp of their angry feet. The outnumbered robots fell back. Pete and Katrinko seized this golden opportunity to slip out the hole. They climbed swiftly up the hull, and out of reach of the combat. The locals fired their big harpoon again. This time the barbed tip struck true, and it stuck there quivering. Then a little kid was heaved into place, half-naked, with a hammer and screws, and a rope threaded through his belt. He had a crown of dripping candles set upon his head. Katrinko glanced back, and stopped dead. Pete urged her on, then stopped as well. The child began reeling himself industriously along the trembling harpoon line, trailing a bigger rope. An airborne machine came to menace him. It fell back twitching, pestered by a nasty scattering of crossbow bolts. Pete found himself mesmerized. He hadn't felt the desperation of the circumstances, until he saw this brave little boy ready to fall to his death. Pete had seen many climbers who took risks because they were crazy. He'd seen professional climbers, such as himself, who played games with risk as masters of applied technique. He'd never witnessed climbing as an act of raw, desperate sacrifice. The heroic child arrived on the grainy hull of the alien ship, and began banging his pitons in a hammer-swinging frenzy. His crown of candles shook and flickered with his efforts. The boy could barely see. He had slung himself out into stygian darkness to fall to his doom. Pete climbed up to Katrinko and quickly linked in on cable. "We gotta leave now, kid. It's now or

never." "Not yet," Katrinko said. "I'm taping all this." "It's our big chance." "We'll go later." Katrinko watched a flying vacuum cleaner batting by, to swat cruelly at the kid's legs. She turned her masked head to Pete and her whole body stiffened with rage. "You got a cheesewire left?" "I got three." "Gimme. I gotta go help him." *** Katrinko unplugged, slicked down the starship's wall in a daring controlled slide, and hit the stretched rope. To Pete's complete astonishment, Katrinko lit there in a crouch, caught herself atop the vibrating line, and simply ran for it. She ran along the humming tightrope in a thrumming blur, stunning the locals so thoroughly that they were barely able to fire their crossbows. Flying quarrels whizzed past and around her, nearly skewering the terrified child at the far end of the rope. Then Katrinko leapt and bounded into space, her gloves and cleats outspread. She simply vanished. It was a champion's gambit if Pete had ever seen one. It was a legendary move. Pete could manage well enough on a tightrope. He had experience, excellent balance, and physical acumen. He was, after all, a professional. He could walk a rope if he was put to the job. But not in full climbing gear, with cleats. And not on a slack, handbraided, homemade rope. Not when the rope was very poorly anchored by a homemade pig-iron harpoon. Not when he outweighed Katrinko by twenty kilos. Not in the middle of a flying circus of airborne robots. And not in a cloud of arrows. Pete was simply not that crazy any more. Instead, he would have to follow Katrinko the sensible way. He would have to climb the starship, traverse the ceiling, and climb down to the third starship onto the far side. A hard three hours' work at the very best— four hours, with any modicum of safety. Pete weighed the odds, made up his mind, and went after the job. Pete turned in time to see Katrinko busily cheesewiring her way through the hull of Starship Three. A gout of white light poured out as the cored plug slid aside. For a deadly moment, Katrinko was a silhouetted goblin, her camou useless as the starship's radiance framed her. Her clothing fluttered in a violent gust of escaping air. Below her, the climbing child had anchored himself to the wall and tied off his second rope. He looked up at the sudden gout of light, and he screamed so loudly that the whole universe rang.

The child's many relatives reacted by instinct, with a ragged volley of crossbow shots. The arrows veered and scattered in the gusting wind, but there were a lot of them. Katrinko ducked, and flinched, and rolled headlong into the starship. She vanished again. Had she been hit? Pete set an anchor, tied off, and tried the radio. But without the relays in the haulbag, the weak signal could not get through. Pete climbed on doggedly. It was the only option left. After half an hour, Pete began coughing. The starry cosmic cavity had filled with a terrible smell. The stench was coming from the invaded starship, pouring slowly from the cored-out hole. A long-bottled, deadly stink of burning rot. Climbing solo, Pete gave it his best. His shoulder was bad and, worse yet, his spex began to misbehave. He finally reached the cored-out entrance that Katrinko had cut. The locals were already there in force, stringing themselves a sturdy rope bridge, and attaching it to massive screws. The locals brandished torches, spears, and crossbows. They were fighting off the incessant attacks of the robots. It was clear from their wild expressions of savage glee that they had been longing for this moment for years. Pete slipped past them unnoticed, into Starship Three. He breathed the soured air for a moment, and quickly retreated again. He inserted a new set of mask filters, and returned. He found Katrinko's cooling body, wedged against the ceiling. An unlucky crossbow shot had slashed through her suit and punctured Katrinko's left arm. So, with her usual presence of mind, she had deftly leapt up a nearby wall, tied off on a chock, and hidden herself well out of harm's way. She'd quickly stopped the bleeding. Despite its awkward location, she'd even managed to get her wound bandaged. Then the foul air had silently and stealthily overcome her. With her battered ribs and a major wound, Katrinko hadn't been able to tell her dizziness from shock. Feeling sick, she had relaxed, and tried to catch her breath. A fatal gambit. She was still hanging there, unseen and invisible, dead. Pete discovered that Katrinko was far from alone. The crew here had all died. Died months ago, maybe years ago. Some kind of huge fire inside the spacecraft. The electric lights were still on, the internal machinery worked, but there was no one left here but mummies. These dead tribal people had the nicest clothes Pete had yet seen. Clearly they'd spent a lot of time knitting and embroidering, during the many weary years of their imprisonment. The corpses had all kinds of layered sleeves and tatted aprons, and braided belt-ties, and lacquered hairclips, and excessively nifty little sandals. They'd all smothered horribly during the sullen inferno, along with their cats and dogs and enormous chickens, in a sudden wave of smoke and combustion that had filled their spacecraft in minutes. This was far too complicated to be anything as simple as mere genocide. Pete figured the mandarins for gentlemen technocrats, experts with the best of intentions. The lively possibility remained that it was mass suicide. But on mature consideration, Pete had to figure this for a very bad, and very embarrassing, social-engineering accident.

Though that certainly wasn't what they would say about this mess, in Washington. There was no political mess nastier than a nasty ethnic mess. Pete couldn't help but notice that these well-behaved locals hadn't bothered to do any harm to their spacecraft's lavish surveillance equipment. But their cameras were off and their starship was stone dead anyway. The air began to clear inside the spacecraft. A pair of soldiers from Starship Number Two came stamping down the hall, industriously looting the local corpses. They couldn't have been happier about their opportunity. They were grinning with awestruck delight. Pete returned to his comrade's stricken body. He stripped the camou suit— he needed the batteries. The neuter's lean and sexless corpse was puffy with subcutaneous storage pockets, big encystments of skin where Katrinko stored her last-ditch escape tools. The battered ribs were puffy and blue. Pete could not go on. Pete returned to the break-in hole, where he found an eager crowd. The invaders had run along the rope-bridge and gathered there in force, wrinkling their noses and cheering in wild exaltation. They had beaten the robots; there simply weren't enough of the machines on duty to resist a whole enraged population. The robots just weren't clever enough to out-think armed, coordinated human resistance— not without killing people wholesale, and they hadn't been designed for that. They had suffered a flat-out defeat. Pete frightened the cheering victors away with a string of flash-bangs. Then he took careful aim at the lip of the drop, and hoisted Katrinko's body, and flung her far, far, tumbling down, into the boiling pools. *** Pete retreated to the first spacecraft. It was a very dispiriting climb, and when he had completed it, his shoulder had the serious, familiar ache of chronic injury. He hid among the unknowing population while he contemplated his options. He could hide here indefinitely. His camou suit was slowly losing its charge, but he felt confident that he could manage very well without the suit. The starship seemed to feature most any number of taboo areas. Blocked-off no-go spots, where there might have been a scandal once, or bloodshed, or a funny noise, or a strange, bad, panicky smell. Unlike the violent, reckless crowd in Starship Two, these locals had fallen for the cover story. They truly believed that they were in the depths of space bound for some better, brighter pie in their starry stone sky. Their little stellar ghetto was full of superstitious kinks. Steeped in profound ignorance, the locals imagined that their every sin caused the universe to tremble. Pete knew that he should try to take his data back to the glider. This was what Katrinko would have wanted. To die, but leave a legend-a very City Spider thing. But it was hard to imagine battling his way past resurgent robots, climbing the walls with an injured shoulder, then making a four-day bitter trek through a freezing desert, all completely alone. Gliders didn't last forever, either. Spy gliders weren't built to last. If Pete found the glider with its batteries flat, or its

cute little brain gone sour, Pete would be all over. Even if he'd enjoyed a full set of equipment, with perfect health, Pete had few illusions about a solo spring outing, alone and on foot, over the Himalayas. Why risk all that? After all, it wasn't like this subterranean scene was breaking news. It was already many years old. Someone had conceived, planned and executed this business a long time ago. Important people with brains and big resources had known all about this for years. Somebody knew. Maybe not the Lieutenant Colonel, on the lunatic fringe of NAFTA military intelligence. But. When Pete really thought about the basic implications ... This was a great deal of effort, and for not that big a payoff. Because there just weren't that many people cooped up down here. Maybe fifteen thousand of them, tops. The Asian Sphere must have had tens of thousands of unassimilated tribal people, maybe hundreds of thousands. Possibly millions. And why stop at that point? This wasn't just an Asian problem. It was a very general problem. Ethnic, breakaway people, who just plain couldn't, or wouldn't, play the twenty-first century's games. How many Red Chinese atom-bomb tests had taken place deep in the Taklamakan? They'd never bothered to brief him on ancient history. But Pete had to wonder if, by now, maybe they hadn't gotten this stellar concept down to a fine art. Maybe the Sphere had franchised their plan to Europe and NAFTA. How many forgotten holes were there, relic pockets punched below the hide of the twenty-first century, in the South Pacific, and Australia, and Nevada? The deadly trash of a long-derailed Armageddon. The sullen trash heaps where no one would ever want to look. Sure, he could bend every nerve and muscle to force the world to face all this. But why? Wouldn't it make better sense to try to think it through first? Pete never got around to admitting to himself that he had lost the will to leave. *** As despair slowly loosened its grip on him, Pete grew genuinely interested in the locals. He was intrigued by the stark limits of their lives and their universe, and in what he could do with their narrow little heads. They'd never had a supernatural being in their midst before; they just imagined them all the time. Pete started with a few poltergeist stunts, just to amuse himself. Stealing the spangled hats of the local greybeards. Shuffling the palm leaf volumes in their sacred libraries. Hijacking an abacus or two. But that was childish. The locals had a little temple, their special holy of holies. Naturally Pete made it his business to invade the place. The locals kept a girl locked up in there. She was very pretty, and slightly insane, so this made her the perfect candidate to become their Sacred Temple Girl. She was the Official Temple Priestess of Starship Number One. Apparently, their modest community could only afford one, single, awe-inspiring Virgin High Priestess. But they were practical folks, so they did the best with what they had available. The High Priestess was a pretty young woman with a stiflingly pretty life. She had her own maidservants, a wardrobe of ritual clothing, and a very time-consuming hairdo. The High Priestess spent her entire life carrying out highly complex, totally useless, ritual actions. Incense burnings, idol dustings, washings and

purifications, forehead knocking, endless chanting, daubing special marks on her hands and feet. She was sacred and clearly demented, so they watched her with enormous interest, all the time. She meant everything to them. She was doing all these crazy, painful things so the rest of them wouldn't have to. Everything about her was completely and utterly foreclosed. Pete quite admired the Sacred Temple Girl. She was very much his type, and he felt a genuine kinship with her. She was the only local that Pete could bear to spend any personal time with. So after prolonged study of the girl and her actions, one day, Pete manifested himself to her. First, she panicked. Then she tried to kill him. Naturally that effort failed. When she grasped the fact that he was hugely powerful, totally magical, and utterly beyond her ken, she slithered around the polished temple floor, rending her garments and keening aloud, clearly in the combined hope/fear of being horribly and indescribably defiled. Pete understood the appeal of her concept. A younger Pete would have gone for the demonic subjugation option. But Pete was all grown up now. He hardly saw how that could help matters any, or, in fact, make any tangible difference in their circumstances. They never learned each other's languages. They never connected in any physical, mental, or emotional way. But they finally achieved a kind of status quo, where they could sit together in the same room, and quietly study one another, and fruitlessly speculate on the alien contents of one another's heads. Sometimes, they would even get together and eat something tasty. That was every bit as good as his connection with these impossibly distant people was ever going to get. *** It had never occurred to Pete that the stars might go out. He'd cut himself a sacred, demonic bolt-hole, in a taboo area of the starship. Every once in a while, he would saw his way through the robots' repair efforts and nick out for a good long look at the artificial cosmos. This reassured him, somehow. And he had other motives as well. He had a very well founded concern that the inhabitants of Starship Two might somehow forge their way over, for an violent racist orgy of looting, slaughter, and rapine. But Starship Two had their hands full with the robots. Any defeat of the bubbling gelbrain and its hallucinatory tools could only be temporary. Like an on-rushing mudslide, the gizmos would route around obstructions, infiltrate every evolutionary possibility, and always, always keep the pressure on. After the crushing defeat, the bubbling production vats went into biomechanical overdrive. The old regime had been overthrown. All equilibrium was gone. The machines had gone back to their cybernetic dreamtime. Anything was possible now. The starry walls grew thick as fleas with a seething mass of new-model jailers. Starship Two was beaten back once again, in another bitter, uncounted, historical humiliation. Their persecuted homeland became a mass of grotesque cement. Even the portholes were gone now, cruelly sealed in technological spit and ooze. A living grave.

Pete had assumed that this would pretty much finish the job. After all, this clearly fit the parameters of the system's original designers. But the system could no longer bother with the limits of human intent. When Pete gazed through a porthole and saw that the stars were fading, he knew that all bets were off. The stars were being robbed. Something was embezzling their energy. He left the starship. Outside, all heaven had broken loose. An unspeakable host of creatures were migrating up the rocky walls, bounding, creeping, lurching, rappelling on a web of gooey ropes. Heading for the stellar zenith. Bound for transcendence. Bound for escape. Pete checked his aging cleats and gloves, and joined the exodus at once. None of the creatures bothered him. He had become one of them now. His equipment had fallen among them, been absorbed, and kicked open new doors of evolution. Anything that could breed a can opener could breed a rock chock and a piton, a crampon, and a pulley, and a carabiner. His haul bags, Katrinko's bags, had been stuffed with generations of focused human genius, and it was all about one concept: UP. Going up. Up and out. *** The unearthly landscape of the Taklamakan was hosting a robot war. A spreading mechanical prairie of inching, crawling, biting, wrenching, hopping mutations. And pillars of fire: Sphere satellite warfare. Beams pouring down from the authentic heavens, invisible torrents of energy that threw up geysers of searing dust. A bio-engineer's final nightmare. Smart, autonomous hell. They couldn't kill a thing this big and keep it secret. They couldn't burn it up fast enough. No, not without breaking the containment domes, and spilling their own ancient trash across the face of the earth. A beam crossed the horizon like the finger of God, smiting everything in its path. The sky and earth were thick with flying creatures, buzzing, tumbling, sculling. The beam caught a big machine, and it fell spinning like a multiton maple seed. It bounded from the side of a containment dome, caromed like a dying gymnast, and landed below Spider Pete. He crouched there in his camou, recording it all. It looked back at him. This was no mere robot. It was a mechanical civilian journalist. A brightly painted, ultramodern, European network drone, with as many cameras on board as a top-flight media mogul had martinis. The machine had smashed violently against the secret wall, but it was not dead. Death was not on its agenda. It was way game. It had spotted him with no trouble at all. He was a human interest story. It was looking at him. Glancing into the cold spring sky, Pete could see that the journalist had brought a lot of its friends. The robot rallied its fried circuits, and centered him within a spiraling focus. Then it lifted a multipronged limb, and ceremonially spat out every marvel it had witnessed, up into the sky and out into the seething depths of the global web.

Pete adjusted his mask and his camou suit. He wouldn't look right, otherwise. "Dang," he said. The Island of the Immortals URSULA K. LE GUIN Ursula K. Le Guin is one of the best-known and most universally respected SF writers in the world today. Her famous novel The Left Hand of Darkness may have been the most influential SF novel of its decade, and shows every sign of becoming one of the enduring classics of the genre— even ignoring the rest of Le Guin's work, the impact of this one novel alone on future SF and future SF writers would be incalculably strong. (Her 1968 fantasy novel, A Wizard of Earthsea, would be almost as influential on future generations of high fantasy writers.) The Left Hand of Darkness won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, as did Le Guin's monumental novel The Dispossessed a few years later. Her novel Tehanu won her another Nebula in 1990, and she has also won three other Hugo Awards and two Nebula Awards for her short fiction, as well as the National Book Award for children's literature for her novel The Farthest Shore, part of her acclaimed Earthsea trilogy. Her other novels include Planet of Exile, The Lathe of Heaven, City of Illusions, Rocannon's World, The Beginning Place, The Eye of the Heron, The Tombs of Atuan, Searoad, and the controversial multimedia novel Always Coming Home. She has had seven collections: The Wind's Twelve Quarters, Orsinian Tales, The Compass Rose, Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences, A Fisherman of the Inland Sea, Four Ways to Forgiveness, and most recently, Unlocking the Air. Last year she published Steering the Craft, a slim book on the craft of writing fiction. Her stories have appeared in our Second, Fifth, Eighth, Twelfth, and Thirteenth Annual Collections. She lives with her husband in Portland, Oregon. In the quiet little story that follows, as sharply, exquisitely, and perfectly drawn as a miniature on tortoiseshell, she shows us that everything has a price ... and that the more valuable the object of desire is, the higher that price is likely to be.... Somebody asked me if I'd heard that there were immortal people on the Yendian Plane, and somebody else told me that there were, so when I go there, I asked about them. The travel agent rather reluctantly showed me a place called the Island of the Immortals on her map. "You don't want to go there," she said. "I don't?" "Well, it's dangerous," she said, looking at me as if she thought I was not the danger-loving type, in which she was entirely correct. She was a rather unpolished local agent, not an employee of the Interplanary Service. Yendi is not a popular destination. In many ways it's so like our own plane that it seems hardly worth the trouble of visiting. There are differences, but they're subtle. "Why is it called the Island of the Immortals?" "Because some of the people there are immortal." "They don't die?" I asked, never quite sure of the accuracy of my translatomat. "They don't die," she said indifferently. "Now, the Prinjo Archipelago is a lovely place for a restful

fortnight." Her pencil moved southward across the map of the Great Sea of Yendi. My gaze remained on the large, lonely Island of the Immortals. I pointed to it. "Is there a hotel— there?" "There are no tourist facilities. Just cabins for the diamond hunters." "There are diamond mines?" "Probably," she said. She had become dismissive. "What makes it dangerous?" "The flies." "Biting flies? Do they carry disease?" "No." She was downright sullen by now. "I'd like to try it for a few days," I said, as winningly as I could. "Just to find out if I'm brave. If I get scared, I'll come right back. Give me an open flight back." "No airport." "Ah," said I, more winningly than ever. "So how would I get there?" "Ship," she said, unwon. "Once a week." Nothing rouses an attitude like an attitude. "Fine!" I said. At least, I thought as I left the travel agency, it won't be anything like Laputa. I had read Gulliver's Travels as a child, in a slightly abridged and probably greatly expurgated version. My memory of it was like all my childhood memories, immediate, broken, vivid— bits of bright particularity in a vast drift of oblivion. I remembered that Laputa floated in the air, so you had to use an airship to get to it. And really I remembered little else, except that the Laputans were immortal, and that I had liked it the least of Gulliver's four Travels, deciding it was for grown-ups, a damning quality at the time. Did the Laputans have spots, moles, something like that, which distinguished them? And were they scholars? But they grew senile, and lived on and on in incontinent idiocy— or did I imagine that? There was something nasty about them, something like that, something for grown-ups. But I was on Yendi, where Swift's works are not in the library. I could not look it up. Instead, since I had a whole day before the ship sailed, I went to the library and looked up the Island of the Immortals. The Central Library of Undund is a noble old building full of modern conveniences, including book-translatomats. I asked a librarian for assistance and he brought me Postwand's Explorations, written about a hundred and sixty years earlier, from which I copied what follows. At the time Postwand wrote, the port city where I was staying, An Ria, had not been founded; the great wave of settlers from the east had not begun; the peoples of the coast were scattered tribes of shepherds and farmers. Postwand took a rather patronizing but intelligent interest in their stories.

"Among the legends of the peoples of the West Coast," he writes, "one concerned a large island two or three days west from Undund Bay, where live the people who never die. All whom I asked about it were familiar with the reputation of the Island of the Immortals, and some even told me that members of their tribe had visited the place. Impressed with the unanimity of this tale, I determined to test its veracity. When at length Vong had finished making repairs to my boat, I sailed out of the Bay and due west over the Great Sea. A following wind favored my expedition. "About noon on the fifth day, I raised the island. Low-lying, it appeared to be at least fifty miles long from north to south. "In the region in which I first brought the boat close to the land, the shores were entirely salt marsh. It being low tide, and the weather unbearably sultry, the putrid smell of the mud kept us well away, until at length sighting sand beaches I sailed into a shallow bay and soon saw the roofs of a small town at the mouth of a creek. We tied up at a crude and decrepit jetty and with indescribable emotion, on my part at least, set foot on this isle reputed to hold the secret of ETERNAL LIFE." I think I shall abbreviate Postwand; he's long-winded, and besides, he's always sneering at Vong, who seems to do most of the work and have none of the indescribable emotions. So he and Vong trudged around the town, finding it all very shabby and nothing out of the way, except that there were dreadful swarms of flies. Everyone went about in gauze clothing from head to toe, and all the doors and windows had screens. Postwand assumed the flies would bite savagely, but found they didn't; they were annoying, he says, but one scarcely felt their bites, which didn't swell up or itch. He wondered if they carried some disease. He asked the islanders, who disclaimed all knowledge of disease, saying nobody ever got sick except mainlanders. At this, Postwand got excited, naturally, and asked them if they ever died. "Of course," they said. He does not say what else they said, but one gathers they treated him as yet another idiot from the mainland asking stupid questions. He becomes quite testy, and makes comments on their backwardness, bad manners, and execrable cookery. After a disagreeable night in a hut of some kind, he explored inland for several miles, on foot since there was no other way to get about. In a tiny village near a marsh he saw a sight that was, in his words, "proof positive that the islanders' claim of being free from disease was mere boastfulness, or something yet more sinister: for a more dreadful example of the ravages of udreba I have never seen, even in the wilds of Rotogo. The sex of the poor victim was indistinguishable; of the legs, nothing remained but stumps; the whole body was as if it had been melted in fire; only the hair, which was quite white, grew luxuriantly, long, tangled, and filthy— a crowning horror to this sad spectacle." I looked up udreba. It's a disease the Yendians dread as we dread leprosy, which it resembles, though it is far more immediately dangerous; a single contact with saliva or any exudation can cause infection. There is no vaccine and no cure. Postwand was horrified to see children playing close by the udreb. He apparently lectured a woman of the village on hygiene, at which she took offense and lectured him back, telling him not to stare at people. She picked up the poor udreb "as if it were a child of five," he says, and took it into her hut. She came out with a bowl full of something, muttering loudly. At this point Vong, with whom I sympathize, suggested that it was time to leave. "I acceded to my companion's groundless apprehensions," Postwand says. In fact, they sailed away that evening. I can't say that this account raised my enthusiasm for visiting the island. I sought some more modern information. My librarian had drifted off, the way Yendians always seemed to do. I didn't know how to use the subject catalogues, or it was even more incomprehensibly organized than our electronic subject catalogues, or there was singularly little information concerning the Island of the Immortals in the library.

All I found was a treatise on the Diamonds of Aya— a name sometimes given the island. The article was too technical for the translatomat. I couldn't understand much except that apparently there were no mines; the diamonds did not occur deep in the earth but were to be found lying on the surface of it, as I think is the case in a southern African desert. As the island of Aya was forested and swampy, its diamonds were exposed by heavy rains or mudslides in the wet season. People went and wandered around looking for them. A big one turned up just often enough to keep people coming. The islanders apparently never joined in the search. In fact, some baffled diamond hunters claimed that the natives buried diamonds when they found them. If I understood the treatise, some that had been found were immense by our standards: they were described as shapeless lumps, usually black or dark, occasionally clear, and weighing up to five pounds. Nothing was said about cutting these huge stones, what they were used for, or their market price. Evidently the Yendi didn't prize diamonds as we do. There was a lifeless, almost furtive tone to the treatise, as if it concerned something vaguely shameful. Surely if the islanders actually knew anything about "the secret of ETERNAL LIFE," there'd be a bit more about them, and it, in the library? It was mere stubbornness, or reluctance to go back to the sullen travel agent and admit my mistake, that impelled me to the docks the next morning. I cheered up no end when I saw my ship, a charming miniliner with about thirty pleasant staterooms. Its fortnightly round took it to several islands farther west than Aya. Its sister ship, stopping by on the homeward leg, would bring me back to the mainland at the end of my week. Or perhaps I would simply stay aboard and have a two-week cruise? That was fine with the ship's staff. They were informal, even lackadaisical, about arrangements. I had the impression that low energy and a short attention span were quite common among Yendians. But my companions on the ship were undemanding, and the cold fish salads were excellent. I spent two days on the top deck watching sea-birds swoop, great red fish leap, and translucent vane-wings hover over the sea. We sighted Aya very early in the morning of the third day. At the mouth of the bay the smell of the marshes was truly discouraging; but a conversation with the ship's captain had decided me to visit Aya after all, and I disembarked. The captain, a man of sixty or so, had assured me that there were indeed immortals on the island. They were not born immortal, but contracted immortality from the bite of the island flies. It was, he thought, a virus. "You'll want to take precautions," he said. "It's rare. I don't think there's been a new case in the last hundred years— longer, maybe. But you don't want to take chances." After pondering awhile I inquired, as delicately as possible, though delicacy is hard to achieve on the translatomat, whether there weren't people who wanted to escape death— people who came to the island hoping to be bitten by one of these lively flies. Was there a drawback I did not know about, some price too high to pay even for immortality? The captain considered my question for a while. He was slow-spoken, unexcitable, verging on the lugubrious. "I think so," he said. He looked at me. "You can judge," he said. "After you've been there." He would say no more. A ship's captain is a person who has that privilege. The ship did not put into the bay, but was met out beyond the bar by a boat that took passengers ashore. The other passengers were still in their cabins. Nobody but the captain and a couple of sailors watched me (all rigged out head to foot in a suit of strong but gauzy mesh which I had rented from the ship) clamber down into the boat and wave goodbye. The captain nodded. One of the sailors waved. I was extremely frightened. It was no help at all that I didn't know what I was frightened of.

Putting the captain and Postwand together, it sounded as if the price of immortality was the horrible disease, udreba. But I really had very little evidence, and my curiosity was intense. If a virus that made you immortal turned up in my country, vast sums of money would be poured into studying it, and if it had bad effects they'd alter it genetically to get rid of the bad effects, and the talk shows would yatter on about it, and news anchors would pontificate about it, and the Pope would do some pontificating too, and so would all the other holy men, and meanwhile the very rich would be cornering not only the market, but the supplies. And then the very rich would be even more different from you and me. What I was really curious about was the fact that none of this had happened. The Yendians were apparently so uninterested in their chance to be immortal that there was scarcely anything about it in the library. But I could see, as the boat drew close to the town, that the travel agent had been a bit disingenuous. There had been hotels here— big ones, six or eight stories. They were all visibly derelict, signs askew, windows boarded or blank. The boatman, a shy young man, rather nice-looking as well as I could tell through my gauzy envelope, said, "Hunters' lodge, ma'am?" into my translatomat. I nodded and he sailed us neatly to a small jetty at the north end of the docks. The waterfront too had seen better days. It was now sagging and forlorn, no ships, only a couple of trawlers or crabbers. I stepped up onto the dock, looking about nervously for flies; but there were none at the moment. I tipped the boatman a couple of radlo, and he was so grateful he took me up the street, a sad little street, to the diamond hunters' lodge. It consisted of eight or nine decrepit cabins managed by a dispirited woman who, speaking slowly but without any commas or periods, said to take Number Four because the screens were the best ones breakfast at eight dinner at seven eighteen radlo and did I want a lunch packed a radlo fifty extra. All the other cabins were unoccupied. The toilet had a little, internal, eternal leak, tink ... tink, which I could not find the source of. Dinner and breakfast arrived on trays, and were edible. The flies arrived with the heat of the day, plenty of them, but not the thick fearsome swarms I had expected. The screens kept them out, and the gauze suit kept them from biting. They were small, weak-looking, brownish flies. That day and the next morning, walking about the town, the name of which I could not find written anywhere, I felt that the Yendian tendency to depression had bottomed out here, attained nadir. The islanders were a sad people. They were listless. They were lifeless. My mind turned up that word and stared at it. I realized I'd waste my whole week just getting depressed if I didn't rouse up my courage and ask some questions. I saw my young boatman fishing off the jetty and went to talk to him. "Will you tell me about the immortals?" I asked him, after some halting amenities. "Well, most people just walk around and look for them. In the woods," he said. "No, not the diamonds," I said, checking the translatomat. "I'm not really very interested in diamonds." "Nobody much is any more," he said. "There used to be a lot of tourists and diamond hunters. I guess they do something else now." "But I read in a book that there are people here who live very, very long lives— who actually don't die."

"Yes," he said, placidly. "Are there any immortal people in town? Do you know any of them?" He checked his fishing line. "Well, no," he said. "There was a new one, way back in my grandpa's time, but it went to the mainland. It was a woman. I guess there's an old one in the village." He nodded toward the island. "Mother saw it once." "If you could, would you like to live a long time?" "Sure!" he said, with as much enthusiasm as a Yendian is capable of. "You know." "But you don't want to be immortal. You wear the fly-gauze." He nodded. He saw nothing to discuss in all this. He was fishing with gauze gloves, seeing the world through a mesh veil. That was life. The storekeeper told me that you could walk to the village in a day and showed me the path. My dispirited landlady packed me a lunch. I set out next morning, attended at first by thin, persistent swarms of flies. It was a dull walk across a low, damp landscape, but the sun was mild and pleasant, and the flies finally gave up. To my surprise, I got to the village before I was even hungry for lunch. The islanders must walk slowly and seldom. It had to be the right village, though, because they spoke of only one, "the village," again no name. It was small and poor and sad: six or seven wooden huts, rather like Russian izbas, stilted up a bit to keep them from the mud. Poultry, something like guinea fowl but mud-brown, scuttled about everywhere, making soft, raucous noises. A couple of children ran away and hid as I approached. And there, propped up next to the village well, was the figure Postwand had described, just as he had described it— legless, sexless, the face almost featureless, blind, with skin like badly burned bread, and thick, matted, filthy white hair. I stopped, appalled. A woman came out of the hut to which the children had run. She came down the rickety steps and walked up to me. She gestured at my translatomat, and I automatically held it out to her so she could speak into it. "You came to see the Immortal," she said. I nodded. "Two radlo fifty," she said. I got out the money and handed it to her. "Come this way," she said. She was poorly dressed and not clean, but was a fine-looking woman, thirty-five or so, with unusual decisiveness and vigor in her voice and movements.

She led me straight to the well and stopped in front of the being propped up in a legless canvas fisherman's chair next to it. I could not look at the face, nor the horribly maimed hand. The other arm ended in a black crust above the elbow. I looked away from that. "You are looking at the Immortal of our village," the woman said in the practiced singsong of the tour guide. "It has been with us for many many centuries. For over one thousand years it has belonged to the Roya family. In this family it is our duty and pride to look after the Immortal. Feeding hours are six in the morning and six in the evening. It lives on milk and barley broth. It has a good appetite and enjoys good health with no sicknesses. It does not have udreba. Its legs were lost when there was an earthquake one thousand years ago. It was also damaged by fire and other accidents before it came into the care of the Roya family. The legend of my family says that the Immortal was once a handsome young man who made his living for many lifetimes of normal people by hunting in the marshes. This was two or three thousand years ago, it is believed. The Immortal cannot hear what you say or see you, but is glad to accept your prayers for its wellbeing and any offerings for its support, as it is entirely dependent on the Roya family for food and shelter. Thank you very much. I will answer questions." After a while I said, "It can't die." She shook her head. Her face was impassive; not unfeeling, but closed. "You aren't wearing gauze," I said, suddenly realizing this. "The children weren't. Aren't you—" She shook her head again. "Too much trouble," she said, in a quiet, unofficial voice. "The children always tear the gauze. Anyhow, we don't have many flies. And there's only one." It was true that the flies seemed to have stayed behind, in the town and the heavily manicured fields near it. "You mean there's only one immortal at a time?" "Oh, no," she said. "There are others all around. In the ground. Sometimes people find them. Souvenirs. The really old ones. Ours is young, you know." She looked at the Immortal with a weary but proprietary eye, the way a mother looks at an unpromising infant. "The diamonds?" I said. "The diamonds are immortals?" She nodded. "After a really long time," she said. She looked away, across the marshy plain that surrounded the village, and then back at me. "A man came from the mainland, last year, a scientist. He said we ought to bury our Immortal. So it could turn to diamond, you know. But then he said it takes thousands of years to turn. All that time it would be starving and thirsty in the ground and nobody would look after it. It is wrong to bury a person alive. It is our family duty to look after it. And no tourists would come." It was my turn to nod. The ethics of this situation were beyond me. I accepted her choice. "Would you like to feed it?" she asked, apparently liking something about me, for she smiled at me. "No," I said, and I have to admit that I burst into tears. She came closer and patted my shoulder.

"It is very, very sad," she said. She smiled again. "But the children like to feed it," she said. "And the money helps." "Thank you for being so kind," I said, wiping my eyes, and I gave her another five radlo, which she took gratefully. I turned around and walked back across the marshy plains to the town, where I waited four more days until the sister ship came by from the west, and the nice young man took me out in the boat, and I left the Island of the Immortals, and soon after that I left the Yendian Plane. We are a carbon-based life form, as the scientists say, but how a human body could turn to diamond I do not know, unless through some spiritual factor, perhaps the result of genuinely endless suffering. Perhaps "diamond" is only a name the Yendians give these lumps of ruin, a kind of euphemism. I am still not certain what the woman in the village meant when she said, "There's only one." She was not referring to the immortals. She was explaining why she didn't protect herself or her children from the flies, why she found the risk not worth the bother. It is possible that she meant that among the swarms of flies in the island marshes there is only one fly, one immortal fly, whose bite infects its victim with eternal life. Sea Change, with Monsters PAUL J. McAULEY Here's a vivid and suspenseful scientific thriller that takes us to the outer reaches of the solar system, to a brooding Gothic monastery on the frozen surface of the Jovian moon Europa, where an intrepid investigator must match wits with a sinister group of fanatical monks in order to unravel a high-tech mystery with chilling implications for all of human civilization.... Born in Stroud, England, in 1955, Paul J. McAuley now makes his home in London. He is considered to be one of the best of the new breed of British writers (although a few Australian writers could be fit in under this heading as well) who are producing that sort of revamped, updated, wide-screen Space Opera sometimes referred to as "radical hard science fiction." He is a frequent contributor to Interzone, as well as to markets such as Amazing, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov's Science Fiction, When the Music's Over, and elsewhere. His first novel, Four Hundred Billion Stars, won the Philip K. Dick Award, and his most recent collection, The Invisible Country, was also a finalist for the award. His other books include the novels Of the Fall, Eternal Light, and Pasquale's Angel, a collection of his short work, The King of the Hill and Other Stories, and an original anthology co-edited with Kim Newman, In Dreams. His acclaimed novel, Fairyland, won both the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the John W. Campbell Award in 1996. His most recent books are Child of the River and Ancient of Days, the first two volumes of a major trilogy of ambitious scope and scale, Confluence, set ten million years in the future. Currently he is working on a new novel, Life on Mars. His Web site is at http://www.omegacom.demon.co.uk. She made it clear that she was taking the job as a favor. Vlad Simonov pretended to be slighted by her reluctance. He said, "But Indira, what's the problem? It's a fantastic job, and it's not as if you are working." "I have been working," Indira said. "Now I'm resting."

She had spent two weeks supervising the clearance of an infestation of urchins at the perimeter of a farm collective. It had been difficult, dangerous, tiring work, and she had nearly been killed in almost exactly the same way she had nearly been killed on her first job, when she hadn't really known what she had been doing. She had come full circle. She was beginning to believe that she had killed enough monsters. Vlad snapped his fingers and leaned close to the camera of his phone. "After that picayune little job, you need to rest? That kind of thing, I do as an exercise. I do it for relaxation! I do it in my sleep, after a proper day's work. Listen, Indira, I would take this job myself, it is so good, except already I am committed to three others. So I give it to you. With my usual commission of course, but the terms are so generous you will not notice the little I have kept to take home to feed my children." Vlad's restless, good-humored energy was apparent even over the phone. Indira laughed. He said chidingly, "Indira, Indira. You are getting old. You are getting bored. Urchins, spinners, makos, they're all the same to you. Routine, routine, routine. It hurts me to see you like this. So, I put some pep in your life. To make you think again. To make you love life. Say yes. You will have fun, I promise." "Vlad ... we are all getting old." "Not the monsters. While you sit around in your nice, warm, comfortable apt, the monsters are swimming in the cold and the dark, pumping sulfides, getting strong. Indira, this is a very exciting job, and the people who commission it are some kind of funny monks who know nothing about the value of money. You will be rich, even after my tiny percentage is removed. They claim it is a dragon, Indira. You have never hunted a dragon, but I know you can do it. That is why I ask only you." "And that's why I'm taking it as a favor to you, Vlad. Because I know no one else will do it." Indira had started out as an apprentice to Vlad Simonov; now she freelanced for him. He was one of the first generation of hunters, one of the few to have survived the early days of tracking the biowar macroforms, the monsters, which had been set loose during the Quiet War. Vlad liked to project a buccaneering image. He had two wives and five children. He drank brandy and smoked huge cigars. He had a wild mane of black hair with little lights spidering inside its curls. But there was no safer or more cautious hunter in all of Europa's ocean. She said, "A dragon." "Perhaps a dragon. Are you scared?" "I'm always scared." A pod of urchins had ambushed her toward the end of the last job. She had been finning down a long flaw in pure water ice, leading her diving buddy, a nervous farm worker. The flaw had been polished smooth by methane seep. It had reflected her lights in a blue-white glare that had prevented her seeing very much of what was ahead. The urchins had fallen down on her from a crevice. She had doubled up, knocking two urchins off her face mask— their spines left deep scratches in the glass— and had started firing her flechette pistol even as she kicked backward. Her diving buddy had been frozen in fear, blocking her escape; the urchins had bobbed toward her through a dancing dazzle of reflected light. She had coldly and methodically killed every one of them in a Zen-like calm that had thawed to violent trembling as soon as the slaughter was over.

She told Vlad, "I can't go solo against a dragon. If it is a dragon." He said, "You won't need to go solo. The monks have a big weed farm and their workers will help you. Anyway, it's probably no more than a mako. No one has seen a dragon for years— they're probably extinct. The monks see something lurking just beyond their perimeter and make it bigger than it is. Let me tell you what I know." *** Indira's daughter, Alice, came in two hours later. She found her mother in the workshop, with the luggage pod open on the floor. She said, "You only just came home." "I know, sweet." Alice stood in the doorway, bouncing up and down as gently as a tethered balloon. Seven years old, smart and determined. She wore baggy shorts and a nylon vest with many pockets and an iridescent flared collar that rose above her head like a lizard's ruff. Fluorescent tattoos braided her thin brown arms. She had changed them since she had gone off to school that morning. They had been interlocking lizards and birds then; now they were long fluttering banners, red and violet and maroon. Her hair was done up in tight cornrows and decorated with little tags that flashed in random patterns of yellow and green. Alice said, "Have you told Carr yet?" Indira didn't look up. She was concentrating on fitting her dry suit into the pod, taking great care not to crease it. She said, "He'll be home soon. How was school?" "I'm doing a project." "You must tell me all about it." "It's a secret." A pause. Indira knew that her daughter had been down to the service levels of the city again, at the bottom of the ice. She had beeped Alice's location after she had finalized the contract with Vlad. And Alice knew that she knew. She watched solemnly as her mother checked the weapon cases. They were flat metal shells with foam plastic bedding inside. The smallest contained three kinds of specific neurotoxin in glass snap-top vials. Indira made very sure that these were packed properly. At last, Alice said, "Did you know that the city once had another name?" "Of course." "It was called Minos. Why was that?" "Because Minos was one of the sons of Europa. Of Europa and Zeus." When Alice stamped her foot, she bounced a meter into the air. "I know that! It means creature of the

moon. He was the king who built a maze under his palace. But why did it change?" "Politics." "Oh. You mean the war." Alice had been born ten years after the Quiet War. Like all of her generation, she couldn't understand why the adults around her spent so much time talking about it when it clearly made them so unhappy. "Yes, the war. Where did you find this out?" "I saw a sign." "A sign? In school?" Alice shook her head. "Of course not in school. The Goonies—" which was the latest nickname for the soldiers of the Three Powers Occupying Force—"have changed all the signs they know about. But they don't know everything." "Then where was it?" Alice said, "Carr will be cross because you're going away again so soon." "That's because he loves me almost as much as he loves you. Where was this sign, Alice?" "It's to do with my project. So it's a secret until my project's finished." Indira closed the luggage pod. It made a little whirring noise as it sealed itself up. She didn't want an argument just before she went away, but she didn't want Alice to think that she could disobey her. She said, "I think we had better have a little talk, you and I." Later, Carr said, "There's nothing to harm her down there." "Don't take sides," Indira said. "I'm not. I'm trying to be realistic. Kids go down there all the time. They like staring out into the dark." "She dresses like a Ring smuggler. Those lights in her hair ..." "All the kids her age dress like that. They get it from the sagas. It's harmless." "Why are you so fucking reasonable?" "It's a talent I have." Indira snuggled closer to him. They had just made love, and were both sweating on the big bed, beneath a simulated starscape. Carr liked to keep their room warm and humid. Bamboos and ferns and banana plants surrounded them. The walls were set to show misty distances above a moonlit rainforest. Carr had been born on Earth. His family had migrated from Greater Brazil to Europa a few years before the Quiet War. He was one of the ecological maintenance team of the city; once upon a time, he would have been

called a gardener. He was a strong, solid, dependable man. He and Indira had been a couple for nine years now; several months ago, they had started to buy tickets in the child lottery for the second time. Carr said, "I think it's nice that she wants to make gardens under the ice. A little bit of me, a little bit of you. Did she show you her drawings?" "Of course she did. Once we had made up after the argument about her going down to the service levels. All those friendly crabs and fish." Carr stretched luxuriously and asked the bed's treacher for a glass of water. "Citrus, fizzy, ice." He told Indira, "She wants to think that one day there might be a world without monsters." He took a sip of water. He said, "She wants to be a gengineer." "She wanted to be a tractor driver last week." "That was two months ago. She has been asking all sorts of questions about gengineering. She asked me why there weren't any fish out there in the ocean. You know, I think sometimes she tells me things because she knows I'll tell you." "She's smart." Carr sipped his water. After a while he said, "Why do you have to go away so soon?" "Because of a monster. One of the angry fish Alice wants to replace with happy, smiling fish." "There are other hunters." "You knew what I did when we met, Carr. That hasn't changed. And we need the money to pay for the lottery tickets." Carr put his water down and folded his arms around her. The hand which had held the glass was cool on her flank. He said, "I didn't even know there was a nunnery on Europa." "It's a monastery. For monks. Male nuns. Vlad was a bit vague about them and I can't find anything about them on the net. They're some kind of Christians, but not of any of the mainstream sects." "Whatever. Tell me again why they can't kill this monster for themselves." "I think they tried." A silence. She took a deep breath and said, "I haven't told you everything, and it's only fair that you know. Vlad thinks it might be a dragon." Carr said, "They're extinct, aren't they?" "The last time one was killed was over ten years ago. No one has seen one since. But absence of evidence—" "— is not evidence of absence. So Vlad the Impaler wants to send you out against a dragon all by yourself." "We're not certain it is a dragon. And I won't exactly be alone. There will be the monks."

*** Indira had met Vlad Simonov almost twenty years before, just after the end of the Quiet War. She had been a construction diver then, helping build the city's first weed farm. Biowar macroforms were getting past the sonar and electrical barriers that were supposed to keep them away from the city's underside, and Vlad had been hired to clear out a nest of urchins. The things had learned to passively drift through the barriers on currents and reactivate in the lights of the construction site. They were etching away support pylons, and in those days there were still a few of the kind of urchin that manufactured explosives in their cores. Two construction divers had been killed. Indira volunteered to assist Vlad, and they quickly located the place where the urchins were breeding. It was five kilometers east of the weed farm, downstream of the currents driven by the upwelling plume. It was an area of rotten ice eroded by the relatively warm water of the upwelling, riddled with caves and crevices and half-collapsed tunnels, rich in precipitated sulfides. Indira didn't panic when urchins started dropping out of crevices in the ice. They seemed like harmless toys, spiny, fist-sized black balls that wobbled this way and that on pulsed jets of water. She forgot that some could be carrying explosive charges and coolly and methodically killed them with neurotoxin-tipped flechettes, not wasting a shot. Afterward, Vlad said that he liked her style, and that evening they got drunk together to celebrate their victory. She thought no more about it, but a few weeks later he called her up to ask if she would like to help out again. The gengineered biowar macroforms had been delivered to Europa's ocean by penetrator probes during the Quiet War. Viruses had destroyed the food yeasts (and incidentally had caused the extinction of the indigenous microbes that had lived around the hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the ocean); the macroforms had wrecked the yeast reactors, the mines and the cargo submarines, the heat exchangers and the tidal generators. Earth had not expected to win the Quiet War quickly. The Three Powers Occupying Force had no plans to decommission the monsters they had set loose, and no one knew how many there were now. They reproduced by parthenogenesis, like certain insects, and they had contained dormant embryos when they had been released. Hunters like Vlad Simonov were the only reliable line of defense against their depredations. The second job was against a mako that had been systematically destroying mine intakes at Taliesin. Vlad and Indira spent a dozen hours hanging by the probe of one intake, following it as, like a giant articulated proboscis, it moved this way and that in the black water, tracking mineral-rich currents. The mako came in hard and fast out of the darkness, straight at Indira. She held steady and Vlad hit it with his second shot. Afterward, he offered her a permanent job, and she accepted. She discovered a talent for killing. She got no pleasure from it, except to do it as cleanly and professionally as possible, and it did not diminish the guilt she felt because she had survived the Quiet War and her parents had not. Only time did that. But she was good at killing monsters. She cleaned out hundreds of urchin nests, destroyed infestations of fireworms that had wrapped themselves around electrical cables and caused crippling over-voltages, went up against and killed makos and mantas and spinners. But she had never before had to face a dragon, the smartest and most dangerous of all the monsters.

*** Indira took the railway west from Phoenix, along Phineus Linea to Cadmus. The scarp stood to the north, an endless fault wall half a kilometer high. It was one of the highest features of Europa's flat surface. Mottled terrain stretched away to the south, textured by small hills and cut by numerous dikes and fracture lines. Lobes of brown and grey ice flows were fretted by sublimation and lightly spattered with small craters. This was one of the oldest landscapes of Europa. The ice here was almost five kilometers thick. It was early morning, four hours after sunrise. Europa's day was exactly the length of its orbit around Jupiter, and so, from any point on Europa's subjovian hemisphere, Jupiter hung in the same spot in the sky, waxing and waning through the eighty-five hour day. At present, Jupiter was completely dark, a glowering circular black hole in the sky that was nearly thirty times as big as Earth's moon. Indira was in the train's observation car, sipping iced peach tea and watching the beginning of the day's eclipse. It would last three hours, and was the nearest thing to true night on the sub-jovian hemisphere, for when the Sun set, Jupiter was full, and there was almost always one or more of the other three Galilean moons in the sky. There was a sudden flash of light that briefly defined Jupiter's lower edge as the diamond point of the Sun disappeared behind it. Darkness swept across the ice plain; stars suddenly bestrode the sky in their rigid patterns. As her eyes adapted, Indira could make out the flicker of a lightning storm near the upper edge of Jupiter's black disc— a storm bigger than Europa. Indira talked with Carr. She talked with Alice and told her what she could see, and tried to patch up the row they'd had. "Carr misses you already," Alice said. She was on one of the slideways of the city's commercial center. "He says he's going to change your room. It's a surprise." She didn't want to talk about her project. When Indira tried to press her about it, she said, "I have to go. This is where I should be." The train was full of miners. They were all flying on some drug or other. This was their last chance to get high before they returned to work. They were native Europans, originally from South Africa. They wore leather jackets and fancy high-topped boots over pressure suit liners. One of them played a slow blues on a steel-bodied guitar; another, egged on by his comrades, tried to chat up Indira. He was a young man, tall and very handsome, with very black skin and chiseled cheekbones. He spent more time looking at his reflection in the diamond window of the observation car, ghosting over the speeding, star-lit landscape, than he did looking at Indira. His name was Champion Khumalo. Indira thought that it was a nickname, but no, all his friends had names like that, or names out of the Bible. Trinity Adepoju. Gospel Motloheloa. Ruth and Isaac Mahlungu. Once Champion gave up his half-hearted attempt to sweet-talk Indira, they all became friends. Indira learnt that two of Champion's brothers went to the same school as Alice. They passed around a bottle of pear brandy and tubes of something called haze. It smelt sharply of ketones and delivered an immediate floating feeling of bonhomie. The miners were fascinated by her profession. "To clean all the ocean of monsters," Gospel Motloheloa said, "is a noble calling!" "Well, I don't see why we need to go into the world below," Isaac Mahlungu said. "I have been a miner

for thirty years and I have never needed to go there. This is our land, the world all around us." "But the ocean is part of our world," Gospel said. She was the oldest of the miners. Her iron-grey hair was done up in medusa ropes wound with plastic wire. There were keloid scars on her forehead; because they spent their working lives on the surface, most miners suffered from radiation-induced cancers. She said, "The ocean makes the land what it is, and so it is important to get rid of the monsters that infest it." "The monsters are from Earth," Trinity Adepoju said. "That's why we have to get rid of them." He was the guitar player, a tall man even for a Europan, with a ready smile and fingers so long they seemed to have several extra joints as he moved them idly up and down the neck of his guitar. Indira remembered a conversation she had once had with Alice. She had been trying to explain to her daughter why Earth had won the Quiet War. "They have more wealth, more processing power, more people. They have used up their world and now they want to use up all the others." "Then we'll have to do things they can't," Alice had said, so solemnly that Indira had laughed. Champion said, "Even with the monsters gone, we will still live on Earth's sufferance." His friends nodded, and began to tell Indira their war stories. Many of the miners had been on Europa throughout the Quiet War. Although the population of the capital, then called Minos (the miners called it that still), had at last been evacuated to Ganymede, the miners had been left in their camps. Most had managed to synthesize enough oxygen from water ice, but there had not been enough food. "We were so hungry," Gospel told Indira, "that we were thinking of eating our boots at the end of it." Ruth Mahlungu said, "What are you talking about, woman! You are so vain that you would starve to death and be buried in your boots rather than eat them!" The others laughed. It was true: Gospel's boots were extraordinary, even for a miner, green suede decorated with intricate patterns made from little bits of mirror and red and gold thread. There were stories of cannibalism. Several camps had been vaporized by the nuclear device that had broken through the crust to allow the penetrators containing the biowar organisms to reach the ocean. This was at Tyre Macula, on Europa's anti-jovian hemisphere. Although the area had been lightly populated, the blast had killed more than a hundred miners and had left a flat plain of radioactive ice and radial grooves hundreds of kilometers long: a bright sunburst scar on Europa's mottled brown face. Indira had heard all these stories before; it seemed that Europans would never tire of telling and retelling stories about the war. She had stories of her own, but they were all too sad to bear telling. The death of her family, the two years she had spent as an orphaned refugee on Ganymede. At last, she managed to steer the conversation to the monastery. Champion grinned. "You're going there? That's a good joke!" The miners exchanged words in a language full of glottal clicks. They all laughed, but the young miner would not tell Indira what they found funny.

"They're very rich there, those people," Champion said, "They have a very big weed farm. They supply fixed carbon to half the mines." "Their leader is a gengineer," Gospel said. Trinity said, "He calls himself Rothar. I don't think it's his real name. They say he ran from Earth because they caught him doing something illegal. He's probably doing something illegal out there, too." "Maybe making more monsters," Champion said. "Maybe he makes one monster too many and wants you to kill it." "They are strange people," Gospel said. "Not Christian at all, although they claim to be. They call themselves Adamists." This was more than Indira had managed to glean about the monastery from the net. The miners didn't know many hard facts, but they had plenty of gossip. Their talk grew lively and wild. Three hours after the beginning of the eclipse, the double star of Earth and Venus rose above Jupiter's dark bulk, and then the Sun followed and flooded the ice plain with its light. Trinity took up his guitar again and had half the observation car singing along by the time the train reached Cadmus. *** Cadmus was an industrial settlement, several clusters of stilt buildings, storage tanks, a big spaceport that was essentially an ice field pitted with black exhaust blasts, the long track of a mass driver. Indira caught a few hours rest in a rented cubicle. Before she fell asleep, she talked with Carr about the small change of his day. Alice was sleeping. She missed her mother, Carr said. "I miss her, too." "Be careful," Carr said. Soldiers of the Three Powers Occupying Force were much in evidence. Two officers were talking loudly in the canteen where Indira ate breakfast, oblivious to the resentful stares of the miners around them, and she had to endure a fifteen-minute interrogation before she could board the rolligon bus that would carry her to the monastery of Scyld Shield. The journey took ten hours. As the bus traveled west, the diamond point of the Sun descended ahead of it, while Jupiter hung low in the east— Indira had traveled a long way, a quarter of the way around the icy little moon. Jupiter was almost full, banded vertically with the intricately ruffled yellow and whites of his perpetual storms. Their slow churning was visible if Indira watched long enough. Io's yellow disc fell below the horizon and an hour later rose, renewed. The road was a single track raised on an embankment above a wide plain of crustal plates. Some were more than ten kilometers across; most were much smaller. Changes in currents in Europa's ocean had broken the plates apart again and again, rafting them into new positions. It was like crossing the shaken pieces of a jigsaw puzzle of simple Euclidean shapes. You

could see here that the surface of Europa was a thin skin of ice over the ocean, as fragile as the craquelure on an ancient painting. Triplet ridge and groove features cut across the plates. They were caused by the upwelling of water through stress fractures. The ridges were breccia dikes, ice mixed with mineralized silicates, complexly faulted and folded; the grooves between them were almost pure water-ice. They were like a vast freeway system half-built and abruptly abandoned, cut across where the ice plates had fractured or had been buried by blue-white icy flows that had spewed from newer fissures. The road the bus was following crossed a groove so wide that the ridge on one side disappeared over the horizon before the ridge on the far side appeared. Beyond it, geysers powered by convective upwellings had built clusters of low hills that shone amidst patches of darker material. Like Io, Europa's core was kept molten by heat generated by tidal distortions that pulled it this way and that as the moon orbited Jupiter, heat leaking through underwater vents and volcanoes kept the ocean from freezing beneath its icy crust and drove big cellular currents from bottom to top. Cadmus was at the edge of the Nemo Chaos, where a huge upwelling current kept the ice crust less than a kilometer thick. The same upwelling currents that eroded and shaped the icy crust brought up minerals from the bottom of the ocean. It was why the miners were there. Indira saw a solitary cabin crawling away toward the horizon, its red beacon flashing. Every twenty or thirty kilometers, the bus passed the drill-head of a mine, with one or two or three cabins raised high on stilts like so many copies of Baba Yaga's hut. The mines pumped mineral-rich water into huge settling basins. Vacuum organisms grew on the ice and extracted metals, and the miners harvested them. Alice called Indira. She was enthusiastic about her project. Indira pretended to be enthusiastic, too, but she resolved that she would talk with Alice's monitors when this was over. Her daughter's education was taking a direction she didn't like. "Spend some time with Carr," Indira told Alice. "Help him out." "I don't like the flowers. Some of them make me sneeze. And the light is too bright in the greenhouses." "It helps them grow." "The weeds don't need light." "That's because they don't photosynthesize." "I know that. They're—" Alice scrunched up her face and said slowly and carefully—"chemolithotrophs. They absorb the chemicals in the water and make biomass, which we eat." They talked about the metabolism of the weeds for a while. Alice promised that she would ask Carr about photosynthesis. She said that she was doing some gene splicing in the garden labs, using the cell gun. Indira was encouraging. The more time Alice spent in the labs and the gardens, the less she spent skulking around the lower levels of the city. The bus had low priority and had to keep pulling into laybys to allow trucks to pass. Indira was its only passenger, and its first for several weeks. It seemed that very few people went to Scyld Shield. The bus grumbled that the monks weren't friendly. "They tell me to be quiet, and it is a long drive out. I like to talk. It's part of my personality design." The bus paused. It added, "I hope you don't mind talking with me."

"What do you know about the monastery?" "It was a mine, before the war. The monks have built around the old shaft. But of course, I have never been inside. They don't have a garage. If I broke down, someone would have to come all the way out from Cadmus. It's irresponsible, but that's the way things are these days in the free market economy. No one wants to pay for the upkeep of publicly owned infrastructure." Someone had probably dumped a bunch of anti-libertarian propaganda in the bus's memory. Indira was sympathetic, but hastily told it that she wasn't interested in discussing politics. There was a silence. At last the bus said: "Many of the trucks come from the monastery. They supply huge amounts of cheap fixed carbon. Glycogens, proteins, cellulose, starches. They supply the bioreactors of most of the mines in this region." "There must be a lot of monks in the monastery." "I wouldn't know," the bus said. "Only two of them regularly travel to and from Cadmus. The rest keep themselves to themselves." Which was what the dispatcher at the bus garage had told Indira. She could have called Vlad Simonov, of course, but she had her pride. The Sun set. Jupiter's hard yellow light spread across the ice plains. Io had disappeared behind him; a few of the brightest stars had come out. Ahead, something briefly glittered on the horizon, vanishing before Indira could see what it was. The bus crawled on, and an hour later, Indira saw the fugitive glitter again, much closer now. A plume of gas, shining in Jupiter's sullen light. "There she blows," the bus said. "What is it?" "Scyld Shield's methane vent," the bus said. "Most of the mines around here have them." "Of course." Methane bubbled up from the hydrothermal vents and collected under the ice crust, occasionally breaking the rafts apart as it escaped through fault lines. Mines vented excess methane to keep themselves stabilized. The methane dispersed, of course, for at -150°C Europa's surface was just above its triple point, but the vent had deposited drifts of dirty white water snow across a huge polygonal plate. The monastery was on a ridge of brecciated ice beyond. It was not as large as Indira expected, no more than a single silvered dome. The bus took a spur off the main road. It climbed a winding switchback up the face of the ridge and dived into a wide apron hacked out of an ice bench, where half a dozen tanker trucks were parked in front of a mass of insulated pipes, presumably taking on loads of raw biomass. The bus reversed onto a airlock coupling and said goodbye to Indira. "I'll be back in three days," it said. "I come here every three days even when there isn't anyone who wants to ride. That is, if I don't break down. Perhaps you can tell me about the monastery when I take

you back to Cadmus." The luggage pod followed Indira through the freezing cold flexible coupling into a big, echoing, brightly lit room. Two monks were waiting there. Both wore black robes and a kind of cowl around their heads, topped with square headdresses. Both had untrimmed patriarchal beards, with big pectoral crosses hung over them. The older monk was impassive, but the younger was the first man Indira had ever seen do a double-take in real life. *** They had been expecting a man. Sending Indira had been Vlad Simonov's idea of a joke. The two monks left Indira with her luggage pod in the middle of the big, empty space. There were marks on the concrete floor that suggested that it had once been partitioned into many small rooms. A gutted air compressor sat in one corner. She sat down on the pod and tried to call Carr, but her phone wasn't getting any signal. It was so cold that the smoke of each breath crystallized into a floating frost with a tiny tinkling sound, too cold to sit still and wait. She began to prowl around. The empty room took up half the dome; a corridor looped around the other half, with little rooms opening off on either side. None showed any sign of recent habitation. There were two service tunnels. One led downward, curving out of sight; she had just opened the door of the other, its ribbed wall rimed with ice and stopped with a locked hatch, when the older of the two monks found her. It seemed that Brother Rothar, the abbot of the monastery, would talk with her. The old monk's name was Halga. Indira asked him about the other tunnel as they walked down, and he said that it led to the old mine structure, which had sunk into the ice after it had been abandoned during the war. "We cut a tunnel to it to see what we could salvage. Now we use it for storage." "I didn't mean to pry. I was just looking around and wondering where I should stow my gear." "I think you should talk with Brother Rothar," the old monk said. "Is there a problem?" "Brother Rothar will explain." The tunnel wound down a long way. Indira realized that the monastery was like a pin piercing the ice— a pin a kilometer long, with the dome at its head and a winding series of chambers and passages built around its shaft. Brother Halga explained that the whole structure had been synthesized from glass and silicates extracted from the brecciated ice and bound together by diamond wire. Indira wondered how often they had to adjust the shaft because of stress in the icy crust, and Brother Halga told her that the monastery was built on a breccia intrusion that went almost all the way down to the ocean. "The surface is covered with ice, but a hundred meters below the surface it is quite stable." The old monk had a mild, diffident manner. He did not look at her when he spoke.

She said, "I don't mean to make you uncomfortable by asking all these questions." "We are not used to people like you. To women, I mean." His brown face, framed by the black cowl, darkened. He was blushing. They walked on in silence, and at last took a side corridor whose walls, floor, and ceiling were covered in thick red fur. The air was at blood heat. Double doors at the end were covered in some kind of hide, dyed the same red as the fur. Brother Halga opened them, ushered her in, and announced her to the man who stood at the far end of the dimly lit room. "Brother Rothar," the old monk whispered, and stepped backward and pulled the double doors shut behind him. On one side of the room, shelves holding printed books stepped up into darkness. On the other, a stone wall was muffled by an ancient tapestry: an enlarged reproduction of a section of the ceiling of the Vatican's Sistine Chapel, God reaching out from the clouds to a casually reclining Adam. At the far end of the room, a man was standing in front of a huge fireplace, watching a bank of holos that floated in the darkness to one side. The fireplace was as big as an emergency shelter and held an actual, real fire. The flames crackled and danced above a bed of white-hot pressed carbon chunks and sent little licks of aromatic smoke curling over the monumental lintel, and firelight beat over the Persian carpets that layered the floor. Indira had been told that the monastery was wealthy, but she had not realized how wealthy. "Welcome," the man said. His voice was subtly amplified. It boomed and rolled, mellow as good whisky, around the corners of the sumptuous room. He was an old man, thin and straight-backed, with a shrewd, hawkish face. His dusty white skin was marked with dark blotches. He wore the same black robes as the monks, but instead of a cowl, his bald pate was covered with a black skullcap on which molecular shapes were embroidered in gold wire. Heavy gold rings extended the lobes of his large, papery ears. "I have arranged for some food," he said. He crossed to the side of the fireplace, tracked by a spotlight that came on somewhere high above, and pulled a Florentine chair from a little burred walnut table. A plastic tray of food was set on the table: a sloppy puree of some kind of green leaf; a slab of gelatin seamed with chunks of uncooked vegetable; dry salty biscuits. A plastic beaker held pure water. Rothar watched Indira push the puree around and said, "The same food is served in our refectory. We are an ascetic order." He gestured, and one of the holos floating to the side of the fireplace inflated. It showed a view looking down on a refectory in which about a hundred black-robed monks sat in rows, ten by ten, along white plastic tables. She said, "I ate at Cadmus, and then on the bus. This isn't quite—" "What you expected? No. It is not what I expected, either. And there is the problem."

The holo shrank back into the array. Others showed views of a weed farm that seemed to stretch forever. Indira realized that Rothar was showing off. This room; his army of monks; the vast farm. Rothar said, "I have been trying to talk with Vlad Simonov about this ... problem. But he is nowhere on the net." He was rubbing his hands over each other. She noticed that when he thought she wasn't looking at him, he made little grabby glances at her body. She wished that she had worn something over the skintight suit liner. She said, "Vlad is working at a mine on the anti-jovian hemisphere. He's probably under the ice. What is this problem? When do I start to work? Perhaps I can see the echo traces, and any video you have." When Rothar looked at her for a moment, she added, "Of the monster. The monster I've come to kill." "Ah. Now. I'm afraid that there has been a misunderstanding." "A misunderstanding? You have reported a Dragon Class biowar macroform in your area. You made a contract with Vlad Simonov, and Vlad sent me." "There is the misunderstanding. You see, we did not expect him to send us a woman." "One of Vlad's little jokes." "A very embarrassing joke for both of us, Ms. Dzurisin." "That's between you and him. Meanwhile, I have a job to do." "I'm afraid not, Ms. Dzurisin. I am revoking your contract." Indira sat back in the chair and stared at Rothar, who still would not meet her gaze. It came out slowly. Rothar did not want her to hunt the dragon. The monastery was forbidden to women. The bus would return in three days; she would leave then. "Meanwhile, we cannot work our farm," Rothar said. "It will cost us a great deal of money. We are very angry with Mr. Simonov." He did not seem angry; he had not raised or varied his voice at any time during the interview. He added, "I have arranged for accommodation. Breakfast will be brought to you tomorrow. Expect it at six o'clock." "You really do want me out of here." "We are a contemplative order. We rise early. By the time you receive your breakfast, we will have already celebrated our first service. We will serve you at the same time that we eat." She said, "I need to tell my family about the change of plan, but my phone isn't working." "Something to do with the structure, I understand."

"Then perhaps I could plug into your net. Or are you cut off here?" "I suppose that you could go outside," Rothar said. A pause. He added, "You will be quite safe here. We have been freed of the normal Satanic lust that blinds men. Not by chemical or physical castration. Both are unreliable and have unsatisfactory side-effects. And, of course, chemical castration would involve use of those very hormones that taint you and your kind. No. We have all submitted to nanosurgery that has isolated the neurons that control the lordotic response. We are incapable of being tempted because we are incapable of arousal." Indira stared at him. "I see," she said, although she did not understand why he had told her this. Unless it was another form of boasting. At last she said, "I still want my fee." "Of course. We would not dream of reneging on the contract. Goodbye, Ms. Dzurisin." Rothar made no signal, but at the far end of the room, Brother Halga opened the big double doors. *** The old monk took Indira back up the helical tunnel and left her in one of the dome's empty cells. It was as spartan as the room in which Indira had lived with her foster parents in the refugee center on Ganymede, three meters long and two wide, a bare concrete floor and fiberboard walls sprayed with thick resin, the only furniture a fold-down shelf bunk and a combination shower and shit-stool. Brother Halga assured her that it was like all the other cells in the monastery. If that was true, then no wonder Rothar could afford a real fire, all those old books, the ostentatious decor. Like any other pseudo-religious sect, the devotees did the work and the leader got the geld. Her phone still wasn't working. And she could not lock the door of the cell. She left the luggage pod outside and told it to keep watch, but found that she could not sleep. It was too cold and she could not switch off the light, only dim it. And something somewhere in the dome made a roaring noise at unpredictable intervals, shutting off with an explosive bang and a dying series of rattles that emphasized the unnatural silence that followed. Memories of hiding in the city's service tunnels crept around the edges of her consciousness. She resisted them. The whole thing was ridiculous. An order of misogynist monks, a megalomaniac leader who was quite possibly a mad scientist, a secret passage. And a monster, of course, haunting the vast dark ocean at the basement of the monastery ... It was like one of those old gothic sagas. The monks had some kind of religious phobia about women. Fine. Europa was big enough for all kinds of eccentrics. The original charter, drawn up by the first settlers and suspended but not revoked after the Quiet War, had expressly allowed freedom of belief and speech. Let them get on with their devotions; maybe they could keep off the monster by prayer alone. It was nothing to do with her. And yet, of course, it was. Rothar's cold indifferent dismissal had cut her deeper than she liked to admit.

She tried the phone again. Still no luck. It was two in the morning, and she knew that she would not sleep now. She decided to go outside and try her luck with the phone there, and opened the door and told the luggage pod that she needed her pressure suit. *** Indira supposed that the airlock was monitored, but found that she didn't care. She crossed the brightly lit apron, where the trucks squatted over their shadows all in a row, like supplicants, and left the road and climbed to the top of the ridge. Jupiter sat at the eastern horizon, exactly where he had been sitting when the bus had arrived. A crescent of darkness was eating into the bottom of his disc. His yellow light tangled long shadows across the rough, dark ice. The phone still wasn't working. Indira went a long way, in long easy lopes that barely touched the ground, until, about two kilometers out, the phone suddenly woke and started scanning channels. She had to go another kilometer before she could get a steady signal. It was half past three in the morning. It was half past three in the morning all over Europa. No one had been able to divide the moon's 85.2-hour day in a sensible way, so Europans kept universal time. Indira left a message with Carr's avatar, saying that she was fine but the job hadn't panned out, and she would be coming back in a couple of days. She put a priority call to Vlad, and his avatar made various excuses until she cut it off and said, "This is an emergency. I'm flying the black flag." Which was the ridiculous piratical code phrase that gave access to the less public of the avatar's functions. The avatar, which looked exactly like Vlad, down to the tiny lights crawling in its bushy black hair, suddenly froze in the little window in the upper right-hand corner of her helmet's visor, then reformatted. It said, in a voice that was clipped and neutral, now not Vlad's at all, "Of course, druzhok. What do you wish me to do?" The avatar could not contact Vlad— he really was working— but it was able to give her some more information about the Adamists. As the miners had told her, Rothar was some kind of gengineer. His birth name was Gregory Janes. He had been born in Canberra. Presently he was claiming asylum as a political refugee in the occupied territory of the Outer System. He had been working for the government of Earth's Pacific Community, but precisely on what was obscured by contradictory rumors, most of which were almost certainly black propaganda. There was speculation that he had worked on the biowar macroforms before the Quiet War, and that the monastery was able to supply so much biomass because he had improved on the productivity and growth of standard weeds. Rothar had not founded the Adamists, but had taken them over after the death of the charismatic mystic whose acolyte he had become— another crime lurking there, perhaps. The Adamists were an extremist separatist group, the kind that only the pressure cooker of Earth could have evolved. Their creed was simple. They believed that God had created Adam and Lilith as the first of a race who would worship God on Earth as angels did in Heaven. But Lilith had been murdered by Satan, who had then created Eve by ripping a rib from Adam while he had been sleeping. All men since Adam had been tainted by Satan's mark, fallen but redeemable; all women were the handmaidens of Satan. The avatar told Indira that much of the Adamists' creed was mixed up with considerable misuse of genetics, involving the Y chromosome and homeoboxes, and asked her if she wanted a précis. She told the avatar to skip it. She

had heard enough to know that she was glad Rothar didn't want her to work for him. "And tell Vlad that I'll see him when I get back," she said. "We'll have a lot to talk about." She had kept walking as she talked with the avatar, along a folded ridge above the silver dome that capped the monastery's shaft (and the shape of the monastery, she thought, was as graphically symbolic as the tapestry in Rothar's palatial office). The regolith here was gravelly, marked with tracks and the cleated prints of boots, scored and ridged with fretted humps of bare ice. She had begun to follow a road, she realized, a wide road that had once taken a lot of traffic. Europa's surface was one of the youngest in the Solar System. Every part had been flooded and reflooded by eruptions of water and slush ice from the ocean that covered the moon from pole to pole beneath its icy crust; Europa had very few craters because most had been buried or eroded by the constant resurfacing. The landscapes of Mars were billions of years old and the planet was covered in gardened regolith— debris from meteorite strikes— to a depth of more than a kilometer. Ganymede's much younger regolith was merely meters deep; Europa's was no more than a few centimeters. But like any moon with almost no atmosphere, the ordinary processes of erosion were so slow that they might as well be non-existent. A footprint could last a million years before it was erased by micrometeorite bombardment. And so it was here. Indira had stumbled upon the road that had served the original mine. All around, the surface was marked by dozens of years of activity. Parts of the road had been worn through to ice; the ice had been eroded into knobs and long slides, shot through with cracks and columns of bubbles frozen into place. They glittered like diamonds in the helmet light of Indira's pressure suit, diamonds glittering up at her wherever she looked. She still had a couple of hours before she was due to be woken. She did not relish spending it in the spartan cell of the creepily uninhabited dome. Instead, she decided to explore. The suit's radar soon gave her the location of the old mining station; it was below her, buried in the ice. It had probably been built on some kind of insulated raft with superconducting thread dispersing waste heat to radiators in the ocean far below, and its systems must have been left running when it had been abandoned. Presumably, its owners had expected to return in a few weeks. But something— perhaps a quake caused by the Tyre Macula nuclear device— had deflated its insulating raft, and perhaps some biowar macroform had destroyed its heat sink. The dome had sunk slowly through ice melted by its own waste heat. Indira was tracing the perimeter of the dome when her proximity alarm beeped. A moment later she saw a figure duck behind a fold of ice. Someone was following her. She circled around, keeping as low as the pressure suit would allow. No sign of the figure, either visually or on radar. She crossed the old road again, crept in toward the place where she had last seen the figure. A square hole had been cut into the ice, and steps led down into darkness. The monks had excavated the old entrance and later reburied it, but a stress fracture had collapsed and partly reopened the long, steep shaft. Indira climbed over a flow of glassy ice and found the airlock. It was still operational.

The mysterious figure could be behind the door. What the hell. She cycled through. The airlock walls had been deformed by the pressure of the ice into which it had slowly sunk, but someone had sealed up the cracked seams with swathes of black resin. There was air beyond it, the usual seven hundred millibar nitrox mix of Europan habitats, but Indira kept her suit sealed. It was very cold, -50°C, although not as cold as the surface. If the monks had wanted to store things, they could have just left them outside the dome. Unless they were things that would be damaged by vacuum ablation. Unless they were things that the monks didn't want others to see. Speculating about just what those things might be, senses alert for any sign of the person she had followed, Indira wandered through the old mining base. It had been abandoned in a hurry. Perhaps its crew had spotted the incoming missile whose nuclear warhead had blown a hole in the crust to the northwest. Metal equipment lockers lined the corridor that led away from the airlock. Their locks had been cut out and their doors hung open. There was a big rec room in what must be the center of the dome. Food boxes were stacked along one wall; broken furniture along another. Ice crystals had gathered here and there in little drifts, crunching under her pressure suit's boots like dry beach sand. Overhead, the curved ceiling groaned and creaked: the structure was compressed all around by the ice into which it had sunken. The dormitory corridor was littered with paper and infoneedles. The rooms were as small as the cell Indira had been assigned. She looked into one. It was half-filled with a shocking intrusion of ice, its surface glistening blue-white and smoothly sculptured like a muscle flayed of skin, its depths dirty with suspended silicates. In the next room, bedclothes were frozen with the impress of the man who had last slept there twenty years ago. His clothes were still scattered on the floor, stiff and sparkling with frost. Posters of lithe young women scaled the wall. One pin-up stirred against a feeble backglow. She cupped her breasts and began to say something, then froze and rastered back to the beginning of her cycle and stirred again. As she turned away, Indira heard something above the poster's scratchy entreaties and the creaking of the stressed dome. Footsteps were coming along the curving corridor— then a beam of light slashed through the air, turning suspended ice crystals into fugitive diamonds! Somehow, the person she had been following had managed to get behind her. Fearing a trap, Indira dodged clumsily back into the room. In her bulky pressure suit, she was like a monster intruding on a child's bedroom. The poster lit up again, and she tore it down and wadded it in her stiff gloves until its scratchy voice died. She killed her helmet's light and hunkered inside her suit, listening intently, her heart beating quickly and lightly. She had hidden from the soldiers of the Three Powers Occupation Force when they had begun to evacuate Minos. She had been eleven, as stubborn then as Alice was now. The city had been a prime target for the biowar macroforms. Its heat exchangers and its turbines had been destroyed, its yeast reactors had been poisoned. With no food, no power except feeble battery power, and its environmental cycling running out of control, Minos had surrendered while the rest of Europa was still notionally at war. Indira had hidden during the evacuation because she had been possessed with the romantic notion that she would join rebels who in reality were little more than an invention of the Occupation Force's black propaganda unit.

She had been found, of course, but she had missed boarding the heavy lifter that had evacuated the rest of her family. And which, in the long slow orbit between Europa and Ganymede, had been crippled by an explosion in its anti-matter pod and lost all power. Its crew and passengers had either suffocated or died of cold. Indira hadn't known about that until she had arrived at Ganymede. She had spent the two years as a refugee convinced that she had killed her parents. Now her suit's microphone picked up the sound of footsteps, boots rattling loudly on plastic tiles whose adhesive had given way in the intense cold. Going past, dying away. Indira stayed in the dark for two minutes, then cracked the door. Dark and silence beyond. She used infrared to track the footprints of whoever had been following her. One set, leading away down the curving corridor. The airlock must have been alarmed. Someone had come to check. To look for her. A new section of corridor had been roughly welded to an opening cut in the dome's skin. Metal stairs led down. As Indira descended, her suit reported that it was growing warmer, a strange inversion given that warm air should rise. But then she reached the high-ceilinged corridor at the foot of the stairwell and discovered the heat engines that crouched on either side, humming laboriously, their coils shining with frost. Heat was being pumped out of the dome and transferred ... where? To somewhere behind a dog-latched door with the universal trefoil symbol for biological hazard in black on fluorescent orange. Indira hesitated only for a moment. She was still fully suited. If she was exposed to any biological agent she could sterilize her suit by returning to the near-vacuum and -150°C of Europa's surface. The heavy metal door was latched but not locked. Its seals gave only momentary resistance. It swung open on its massive hinges and she stepped over the sill. It was an airlock. She waited while it cycled. When the door on the far side opened, her suit's temperature sensor registered a sudden rise of fifty degrees as air gusted unfelt around her, and lamps came on in the big room beyond. They hung from chains under the high ceiling. They registered only in the infrared. Indira swept the beam of her helmet's light from side to side. Beneath the lamps were rows of big square tanks linked by grey plastic pipework, crusted with yellowish salts and holding various levels of still, black water. Seawater, she realized, the salty, sulfurous water of Europa's ocean. The temperature was just above zero. The air was 90 percent nitrogen and 10 percent carbon dioxide, with traces of hydrogen sulfide, sulfur dioxide, and hydrogen. All of the tanks were empty. The recirculating pumps were switched off; the incubators ranked along one wall held only racks of flaccid salt-crusted plastic sleeves. The tiled workbench that ran along one wall was marked with chemical stains and the places where machines had once rested. A brown glass vial had fallen behind a strut; Indira turned it over in her clumsy gloves, smudged frost from its label. It had held the mixture of restriction nucleases and DNA ligases that was commonly used to insert genes into bacterial plasmids for cloning, either for identification of gene product or use in gengineering. Indira secured a sample of water from one of the tanks and went out through the lock on the other side of the room. It cycled her into a long, rising corridor. At its far end, she stepped through an open hatch and found herself in the curved corridor of the dome which capped the monastery. Down the curve of the corridor, a red light flashed insistently. It was the emergency beacon of her luggage pod.

*** Without prompting, the luggage pod said, "Several people came after you left. They tried to open me. I responded with a class two defense as specified in subsection two paragraph three of the—" Indira set the helmet of her pressure suit on the floor and said, "What did you do, exactly?" "I activated my alarm and gave two warnings. After these were ignored, I passed a high amperage, low voltage current through my outer frame. One of the men who was trying to force me open was rendered unconscious." "Did they manage to open you?" "Of course not. After I defended myself, they went away." The pod added, "Two of them had to carry the man who had been incapacitated." "By incapacitated, do you mean dead?" "The shock was sufficient to cause unconsciousness but not death in a healthy adult human, as specified in subsection—" "You've probably landed me in a whole world of shit." The pod said that it did not understand this remark. "Trouble." "I am sorry," the pod said. "I had believed that I had contained the problem." "Open up. I need to stow my pressure suit." *** By the time Brother Halga appeared, to announce that Rothar would speak with her again, Indira had desuited and run the sample of water through her chemical sniffer. Brother Halga did not mention the attempt to open the luggage pod; neither did Indira. As before, Rothar was standing in front of the roaring fire. If the room was a symbol of his power, then the fire was its focus. Her breakfast waited for her on the little table. Gruel, watery coffee, and a sticky, pale yellow liquid that was, Rothar said, mango juice. Her pressure suit could supply better food, but she drank the coffee to be polite. It was weaker than any of the excuses she had made up, as she had walked down the helical corridor with Brother Halga, to try and explain why she had trespassed in the old mining station. "You will work for me after all," Rothar said. "There have been ... developments."

"I'm not sure that I want to. And surely a man would be better than a mere woman." "Ah. You have been researching us." "A little. But I only need to know a little to realize how much I dislike the entire idea of you and your crew." Rothar smiled. He had small, widely spaced teeth, like those of a young boy prematurely grown up. He said, "We do not despise women. We pity them, as we pity all of humanity. We are a contemplative order that prays for redemption from the mark of Satan that is imprinted in each of our cells." "That's very nice of you." His smile went away. "You will work for us, Ms. Dzurisin. Or forfeit the penalty clauses of the contract you have already signed." "From which you released me." "Only verbally. Do you have a recording? I thought not. Then you have no proof that it ever took place." "For a holy man, you don't set much store by the truth." "None of us are holy, child. And besides, a small lie will sometimes serve a higher truth." Which could justify anything, Indira thought. No wonder religions had caused so much trouble on Earth. Rothar said, "It should not take long. You are an experienced hunter, and I will provide experienced divers to help you. We have men here from all trades. We aim to be self-sufficient. By the way, I hope our laboratory impressed you." Indira looked at Rothar but said nothing. If he wanted to accuse her, she could accuse him of trying to tamper with her equipment. She had a pretty good idea of what the monks had been after. And there was the matter of what she had found in the water sample from the laboratory. "We no longer use that facility," Rothar said, "but it has provided the basis of our farm's profitability. Which is why—" his smile came back—"we will have to search you thoroughly after you have finished. Whether you catch the monster or not." "Oh, I'll catch it." Meaning, I'll show you what a woman can do, and shame you for your presumption that I'm less than you are merely because of my sex. She didn't put the two things together. Her discovery, Rothar's about-face. After all, the story about the weed was entirely plausible; he couldn't know that she had evidence that he must be lying. She thought that it was a matter of pride. His. Hers. ***

The two men who had been assigned to accompany her, Brother Fergus and Brother Finn, were competent and professional, but did not bother to hide their disgust at having to work with a woman. Fergus was dark and wiry and nervous; Finn was blond and burly and quiet, and one of the tallest men Indira had seen, overtopping her by half a meter. His head, covered with the hood of his dry suit so that only his face showed, was as big and bumpy as a boulder. His beard was white, and as fine as cornsilk; like Fergus's, it was done up in a kind of net. Both monks made it quite clear that they thought that this duty was an insult to their dignity. Neither offered any information about the dragon. No sonar signals, no video grabs, no chemical traces. "We know it is there," Finn said. "Still, I would like to see what evidence you have," Indira said. "It would confirm that it is a dragon. The neurotoxins I use are class specific." "It is a terrible monster," Fergus said. "That's all you need to know. We can no longer work the farm because of it." He folded his arms defiantly. They were suited up and sitting in the pressure chamber. Finn and Fergus wore black dry suits and black stabilization jackets; Indira's suit was white, her stab jacket yellow. Their scooters made the chamber crowded; they had to rest their feet on them. They were ready to go, but Indira insisted on talking first. She wanted to establish a plan of action and emphasize that they must stick to it. She did not trust them. She had filled her air-tanks herself, and done all her suit checks alone. Finn said, "We know where its lair is." "Lair?" None of the big macroforms lived in the ice. They were creatures of the open water, spending long periods drifting in upwelling plumes, fixing carbon and storing energy for their attacks. And occasionally reproducing. They had been designed to operate for years— overdesigned, as it turned out. The Quiet War had been a rout. "It lives in the ice," Finn said. "Near the farm," Fergus said. They were a double act. The idea appeared to be to give away as little information as possible. It didn't matter. Indira had worked with less— although of course she had never worked against a dragon. "We can do most of the work," Fergus said. "In fact," Finn said, "if you give us the neurotoxins we can do it all." Neurotoxins were the major expense of hunting monsters. They had been tailored to specific classes of biowar macroforms by the wizards who had gengineered them. They were bought on license from the Three Powers Occupying Force, and only hunters were licensed to use them. Grey chemists had tried to isolate the specifics, but they were mixed with several thousand closely related chemicals. Indira had guessed that the vials of neurotoxin were what the monks had been trying to take from her luggage pod

when it had zapped one of them. Having failed to get the neurotoxins, they were stuck with her. "I have already caught and killed one like it," Finn said, deadpan. "She doesn't need to hear that," Fergus said, with sudden violence. "You were told—" Finn punched him on the side of the head and the little monk banged against the steel wall of the airlock and shut up, although he glared at Finn with genuine hatred. But Finn was smiling at Indira. He had about a hundred teeth, as gleaming white as an ice cliff. His blue eyes glittered with psychotic intensity. He said, "I really did. Do you want to know how?" Indira laughed. "You're making a fool of yourself," Fergus said, and flinched when Finn stuck his massive fist in front of his face. Finn said, "I didn't have any fancy gear. No nets or shock bombs or toxins. I fought it one on one. We fought for days. The water boiled with the fury of our struggle. It took me down to the bottom of the ocean, thinking it would crush me and drown me. But I was too strong. It tried to escape then, but I held onto it. I broke open a vent and seared off its fins and its teeth with the lava that spewed out." As he spoke, in a low voice as monotonous as Rothar's, he brought his face closer and closer to Indira's. His pupils were huge, so that his eyes were all black and white. Sweat stood out like oily droplets on his smooth, pale skin. His breath smelled bad: acetone, butanol, sweet rot. Indira was sure that he was flying on something. Perhaps drugs were part of the devotions of these strange, sinister monks. She said, as calmly as she could, "That's a good story." "It's the truth," Finn said. "You don't believe it but that doesn't mean it isn't true." "We don't know how many are out there," Fergus said. "No one knows how often they reproduce. There could be hundreds out there. Thousands." "We don't need to bring anyone in," Finn said, still staring at Indira. "I can handle it." Indira thought of the tanks in the laboratory under the old mining camp. The analysis had showed traces of metabolites and degradation products consistent with the presence of animal metabolism, although her sniffer had not been able to identify the type of animal. Perhaps Finn had caught a monster. Perhaps they had kept it in one of the tanks they had used to develop their strains of weed, although she doubted that it had been a dragon. A spinner, perhaps a juvenile mako. But not a dragon; even a newborn dragon would have torn up the lab. But why hadn't they simply killed it? What had they used it for? Fergus leaned over and dared touch Indira's knee. His black eyes were liquid with what Indira thought was genuine concern. "He gets wired up," he said. "Don't worry. We'll look after you." Finn said, "No more talk. We go." Indira told him to wait. She had already checked her equipment, but now she wanted to check it again in front of the two monks, to show them what she had, to show them that she meant business, to puncture

their contempt. The spear gun with its hollow tipped spears. The taser. The percussion bomblets, the sticky bomblets, the flares. The diamond mesh drift nets. The sonar. The motion detector. The sniffer. Both monks watched her closely, but said nothing. They carried nothing but ordinary spear guns and knives; a pouch of the kind of explosive charges used by construction workers hung from Finn's harness. "All right," she said at last. "Let's do it." Fergus allowed a little water in. Although it was filtered to remove its chemical load, it still had the rotten egg stench of hydrogen sulfide. Indira could feel its cold through the layers of her suit. They busied themselves in the small space, rinsing their face masks in the water and then spitting in them and rubbing the spittle over the inside of the glass of the visors so they would not fog up, checking the seals of their hoods and the straps that fastened the fins to their feet, their weight-belts and the harnesses that held their tanks, putting on their face masks and adjusting regulator mouthpieces. Fergus carried a little video rack and he switched on its lamp for a moment; harsh light flooded the chamber, bleaching out all colors. Then he opened the valve all the way and water gushed from the floor vent, filling the chamber in a few moments. The water of Europa's ocean was at an average temperature of minus ten degrees centigrade. Although its freezing point was reduced because of its heavy concentration of salts, much of the water beneath the icy crust was half frozen into slush: grease ice and firn ice; brash ice and bergy bits. In places, though, currents driven by plumes from hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the sea, fifty kilometers below the surface, carried relatively warm, mineral-rich water to the bottom of the ice crust. Sometimes, currents driven by especially active vents melted the ice crust, and water and slush spilled across the surface of Europa like lava. Mines and farms were built over vent plumes. Mines sucked up the mineral-rich water; farms grew gengineered weed in the Europa equivalent of tropical seawater enriched with fertilizer. Even so, the water that flooded the chamber was at a freezing two degrees centigrade. As it rose around Indira, an intense ring of cold gripped her body, rising with the water and inducing a terrific headache right between her eyes. It was as if she had gulped down a liter of ice cream. The cold of the water was already sucking heat through her thin gloves. It stung the little bits of exposed skin where the seal of her face mask did not quite meet the seal of her hood; then the skin went numb. She bit down hard on the soft plastic regulator that filled her mouth and concentrated on her breathing until the first agony of immersion passed. The air that hissed through the regulator at each breath was dry and metallic. Fergus was staring at a little hand-held videoscreen. It switched every two seconds to show different views of black water under ice. His voice said in her ear-piece, "Looks clear." Finn said impatiently, "They said it was clear. They switched on the lights to make sure that it was clear." "But the thing can travel fast." Their voices were thin and muffled and flat, sub-vocalizations picked up by throat mikes and processed for clarity. Indira said, "I hope it does come to us. Then we won't have to go far."

"We'll find it," Finn said, and hit a big red button with his fist. The chamber rotated with a grinding noise. They spilled out into the black water, dragging their scooters with them. They were in a wide shaft. The bottom of the shaft loomed above, a massive blister of steel studded with grab rails and red and green lights. Someone moved behind one of the thick bullseye ports. The two men angled away and Indira followed. The white vee of her scooter hummed, its vents pushing out water in muscular streams on either side of her, pulling her toward the open water below. The two men were heading straight out at a fast clip past the finned radiators that bled waste heat into the ocean. They had not waited for her. It was a challenge, a typical male gesture. Indira paused to gauge the current, chose a long flat curve that would carry her ahead of them, and throttled up her scooter's reaction motor. She had expected the farm to be big, but it was more than twice the size of her wildest estimate. The maintenance lights were on, and she could see that racks of weed stretched away on all sides of the bottom of the shaft, hundreds upon hundreds of them. Each rack was thirty meters long and five meters wide, bolted to its neighbors in a hexagonal array with orange flotation buoys at each corner, each array was linked at its six points to neighboring arrays and to pylons fixed in the ice roof of the ocean. Weed dangled down from ropes attached to the wire stretchers of the racks, filmy ribbons that in the weak lights glistened violet or purplish red or the reddish brown of dried blood. Mature weeds were a hundred meters long. The whole— weed, racks, rack arrays— flexed sinuously in the current, like the hide of a gently breathing beast. A haze of molecular sulfur, the waste product of the weeds' carbon fixation, smoked off it. Unlike the green plants that decorated Phoenix's public and private spaces, weeds did not need light to grow; the lights were for the workers who maintained the rafts and cropped mature blades. Green plants harvested light energy and used it to transfer hydrogen ions and electrons from water to carbon dioxide, forming the simple sugar glucose, with oxygen as a byproduct. But no light penetrated Europa's kilometers-thick ice crust and there was no free oxygen in all its deep ocean: a fish would drown as quickly as a human. Like the indigenous microbes of Europa and chemolithotrophic bacteria of Earth, the weed used reduced inorganic compounds containing nitrogen or sulfur or iron instead of water and light to turn carbon dioxide into sugars. Most available carbon on Europa was in the form of carbon dioxide dissolved in the ocean beneath its thick icy crust. There had been proposals to crash a carbonaceous chondrite asteroid onto Europa to supply carbon that could be processed by vacuum organisms, but no one had been able to work out how to do this without splitting the crust and resurfacing half the moon. Shortly before the Quiet War, there had been a half-hearted attempt to reach agreement between the five inhabited moons to establish a carbon-mining facility at one of Jupiter's Lagrangian points, but the plan had foundered in acrimonious arguments about sharing the start-up costs of purchasing mining rights to a suitable asteroid and moving it into orbit. Before the war, Europans had augmented their expensive greenhouses by drawing up water and using it to grow gengineered yeasts in big tanks, utilizing metabolic pathways copied from the indigenous microbes that grew in the crushing blackness at the bottom of the ocean, around the hydrothermal vents that opened along ridge faults. The Europan vent microbes had been the only known extant life-forms in the Solar System other than those of Earth. Their genetic code had been based on triplet base sequences

strung on a DNA double helix, reinforcing the modified Hoyle-Wickramasinghe panspermia hypothesis that all life in the Solar System, including the long-extinct Martian microflora, had a common ancestor. On Earth, certain bacteria had combined and evolved into multicellular eukaryotes, into plants and fungi and animals. Perhaps this step required an oxygen atmosphere and the more efficient energy-generating metabolic pathways it could support; in Europa's anaerobic ocean, nothing had evolved beyond the level of colonial microbes, which had formed crusts and sheets, lacework baskets and vases, and vast beds of long filaments, around the hot, black, mineral-rich water that issued from the vents. Life had not spread from these refugia; the rest of the ocean had been a sterile desert. Tailored biowarfare viruses released in the Quiet War had destroyed the industrial yeasts and the native microflora. Afterward, a Pacific Community cartel had introduced licensed strains of chemolithotrophic weed. Even with the premium license tax, the weeds were a cheaper source of fixed carbon than algal ponds or hydroponic greenhouses. Those supplied luxury food items; the weed provided the base input of fixed carbon to Europa's expanding population, just as vacuum organisms growing on the methane and carbon monoxide ices and tars of carbonaceous chondrites supplied fixed carbon to the new Kuiper Belt settlements. In the midst of the monastery's huge weed farm, Indira overtook Finn and Fergus and turned her scooter to face them as they vectored toward her. Her arms ached slightly and she worked one and then the other. Her headache had crept downward, a mantle of numbing cold that penetrated the dry suit and its three underlayers— a fleece liner, a quilted undersuit with a little skull cap, the liner from her vacuum suit. Her fingertips were numb inside the thin gloves; the little bits of exposed skin between hood and face mask were slivers of stinging pain. This would not go away. This would get worse. Yet she felt a thrill of elation vibrating in her core. She was here. She was doing her job. The close possibility of death made her more alive than at any other time. It was not something she could talk about, even with Carr. Only other hunters could understand it. Above was a rippling ceiling of hexagonal arrays of racks, with blades of weed trailing down like hair; below, fifty kilometers of black water. No sign of any movement down there on her sonar. The chemical sniffer that sampled water every few seconds showed no trace of metabolites specific to biowar macroforms. Her regulator valve rattled; dry air hissed. She checked the elapsed time on her mask's head-up display— she had six hours of air in the two tanks she carried on her back, another hour in the emergency bottle clipped to the scooter. "I think she's made a point," Fergus's thin, processed voice said in her earpiece, as the two monks swung in beside her. Boys' games. She said, "I want to look at the damage this monster did." Finn: "That's where we're going." Fergus: "It's at the southern edge of the farm." Finn: "You follow us. Enough hot-dogging." Yes, boys' games. She let the men lead.

They traveled a long way through the cold and the dark. Two kilometers, three. An endless skimming fall below waving ranks of weed. It occurred to Indira that she had seen no one working the farm's racks. Surely there should be at least a hundred people out here, harvesting mature plants and stringing new ropes thick with sporelings. When she asked, Fergus said, "That's because of the monster. Which is why we're out here." "You must have a lot of pressure chambers to handle the traffic." "We manage." Was that Finn or Fergus? Now she began to wonder how the monastery managed such a huge farm. Where were the facilities for servicing the huge numbers of divers that must be needed? Rothar had shown her the refectory filled with monks as a demonstration of his power— but there had been no more than a hundred men. Did all of them work the farm? The creepy feeling, which she had shed as soon as she had powered out into the cold dark water of the ocean, began to return. At last, an hour after they had set out, they finally reached the damaged section. It was near the edge of the farm. It was extensive: at least a hectare. Lights were blown or dimmed to a greenish glow. Whole sections of racks had been twisted free of the supporting pylons, and dangled disjointedly. Other sections were completely missing; presumably they had fallen away to crushing darkness at the bottom of the deep ocean. Weed grew over broken racks and twisted wire stringers, made complex knotted barricades that waved to and fro in a strong southerly current. Indira had to keep blipping her scooter's throttle to stay in place. There were patches in the weed that looked as if they had been harvested very recently. It had been done by someone who knew not to cut at the gnarly node where the weed gripped the rope, knew to leave a length of blade to allow swift regeneration. The cuts were fresh, no more than two or three days old. Had the monks tried to salvage their crop after the monster had wrecked this section? If so, then why hadn't they salvaged all of it? She said at last, "I've only seen pictures of what a dragon can do, but the damage to the racks is consistent." "I told you," Finn said. "I told you that I caught one." Indira ignored this. She repeated what she had told them when they had first met. "This is a snoop dive. We'll look around and then we'll go back and make plans. It should take no more than another hour." "She feels the cold," Finn said. "I feel the cold," Fergus said, and switched on his lights and took shots of Indira against the wreckage, moving around her with dainty frog-kicks. "Just for the record," he said, when she protested that they were wasting time. "We do waste time," Finn said. "We go to its lair. Time to finish this. One way or the other." "Not here," Fergus said. The thin synthesized voice somehow conveyed alarm.

"I know not here. Come." And then the big man was powering off into the dark beyond the wrecked edge of the farm. Indira followed hard on his heels, riding the smooth water in his scooter's wake to conserve her own scooter's power. She did not believe the story about a lair, but she knew that she would have to look. And then she could begin to make her own plans. She would kill the monster today or tomorrow, and then she could go home. Another long fall through black cold water. Once, she looked over her shoulder to check that Fergus was following, and saw that already the lights of the farm had dwindled far behind: a linear constellation of little sparks set in the vast cold night of the ocean. They were skimming along just beneath the icy roof. It was not flat, but undulated in long smooth swales, eroded by the relatively warm upwelling current. It glistened blue and green in the wide beam of the lamp of Indira's scooter. Fringes of ferny platelet ice hung down everywhere, delicate growths that softened the swelling contours of the ice. Now the roof angled down— a smooth intrusion in the undulating ice, an upside-down hill. Indira followed Finn down the long slope. Her depth gauge pinged at every twenty-meter contour. She had nanoformed scavengers in her blood that prevented both nitrogen narcosis caused by high pressure and bubble formation caused by too-swift ascents, but the scavengers only worked within certain limits. They went down almost two hundred meters; then the slope steepened into a vertical wall, and they dragged below its inverted crest. Beyond was a chaos of slab ice where part of the crust had broken away and reformed. Habitat-sized chunks of ice stuck out at all angles, transparent blue ice shot through with white stress marks, like a jumble of giant, rough-cut gems. Finn slowed and Indira slowed, too. They drifted beneath the jagged chaos and came to a stop near a black rift that led back into the ice— a long gently curving slot like a grinning mouth. "This is where they went." Indira did not know if Finn or Fergus had spoken— the distortion of their treated subvocalizations and a sudden surge of adrenaline in her blood obliterated the subtle distinction. "We will get them back." Was that the same voice? Fergus had drifted a little way beneath Finn, who was shining a strong lamp into the rift. Fluted ice reflected its red light in a thousand splinters. "We finish the matter now." That was definitely Finn. Indira's chemical sniffer was flashing urgently. She called up the display. Strong metabolic traces, but no positive identification. Were there several types of macroform here? She started the sniffer's analytical program and said, "There's something in there. In a few minutes I'll know what it is." She turned up all her lights and cautiously edged into the mouth of the rift. A faint but steady current issued from it. The sniffer's HPLC kicked in and started to flash spiky lines as it separated the unknown metabolites. She called up the chemical signature of a dragon as an overlay. And there it was buried amongst traces of other complex chemicals which the sniffer was unable to match against its library.

"Got you," she said, and something flew past her, a quick flash leaving a wake of bubbles that rose around her like a silvery rope. Her backbrain recognized what it was and she turned away in reflex before she realized that someone— Finn or Fergus— had fired some kind of self-propelled explosive charge into the rift. Then it exploded. The pressure wave clamped around Indira, lifted her, shoved her against the roof of the rift, took her again and dragged her down amongst the glistening smooth hummocks of its floor. Big chunks of ice fell with her, through a haze of chips and fragments that washed to and fro in the cross-hatched froth of aftershock currents. Someone was shouting, a thin voice like tearing metal. "Not this way! Not yet!" Somehow, Indira had kept hold of her scooter. She killed her lights and crouched amongst ice rubble. Strong, freezing cold currents washed back and forth over her. There were lights hung beyond the slot of the rift's mouth, two clusters of lights, shining their high beams here and there. She realized that she had been set up. They would kill her here and blame the monster. Because of what she had seen, even if she did not understand what she had seen. Because she was a woman who had dared to trespass on men's territory. And then something big shot past her. Someone screamed and one of the clusters of lights went out. *** It was the dragon. It doubled back, quick as thought. Indira tried to untangle her spear gun. She had an impression of something black and sleek, with two big fins or flippers that curled around a man-sized bundle. Then it was past, swimming strongly into the depths of the rift. Gone. It had taken Finn. Fergus's small figure hung some distance from the entrance. "Keep away," he said, as she angled toward him. "Keep away. I'm armed." She kept going. A spear shot wide, disappearing into the black water to her right. She gunned her scooter and slammed into Fergus before he could recock his gun, spun him around, uncoupled the air hose from his face mask. His masked face was obscured by a sudden flood of silvery bubbles. He waved his arms in blind panic. She counted to ten and stuck the hose in his hand. "All right," he said, when he had it back in place. "All right." "You wanted me dead." "Rothar said it was necessary. He said you would be bait for the monster."

"You were going to video it. You thought I would be almost certainly killed by the dragon. After all, I'm only a woman. And if I had killed it, you would have killed me, and made up a story." Fergus didn't deny it. He said, "Finn wouldn't wait." "He was a coward. Well, he's dead now. That's what dragons do." "It has our workers," Fergus said, pointing toward the rift. It was just visible as a shadow crescent cut into the ice blocks of the tumbled roof, at the edge of the overlapping circles of their lights. Indira said, "If it took them in there, then they're as dead as Finn." How many had the dragon killed? There were about a hundred monks now, but many more than that would have been needed to maintain the farm.... Indira was very cold, and found it hard to follow any thought to its conclusion. Every few seconds, a tremor passed over her entire skin. That sleek black shape. Bigger and faster than anything she had ever seen before ... Fergus made a choking, squealing noise. It was laughter, translated by his throat mike. "Oh no," he said. "At least, they were alive a couple of days ago. They came out to feed. The dragon was with them. They ripped up the perimeter of the farm and disappeared before we could get them. You, you're one of the dead, though. Rothar has seen to it." Then he kicked out with surprising strength and broke free. She let him go. If Rothar was determined to kill her, one little monk wouldn't be much of a bargaining chip. Fergus was a solitary star dwindling through the ocean's black volume toward the distant constellation of the farm. His voice came faintly to her. He said, "Finn really did kill one. It was small, but he killed it." And then: "Don't try to follow me. You don't have enough air...." Indira had almost used up one of her two air-tanks. Apprehensive alarm suddenly fluttered in her chest. She switched to the second. Gas hissed through the regulator but there was no oxygen, and suddenly she couldn't get her breath. Nitrogen. The fuckers had somehow filled her second tank with nitrogen! She switched back as red and black began to blot out her vision. She had about half an hour's worth of air left, and the trip back would take at least an hour and a half. She had insisted on filling her air-tanks herself, but Finn or Fergus must have done some kind of switch, changing the compressor's inlet from the standard nitrox mix to pure nitrogen. She checked the emergency bottle in her scooter, but she already knew. It had been filled with nitrogen, too. She did not have enough air to get back, but there was one place within reach where she could get air. The two men had not planned on the monster killing one of them. Finn's scooter with its emergency bottle was gone, still falling toward the true surface of Europa, a fifty-kilometer fall that might take three days. But perhaps his main tanks were still intact. She had no other choice. And there was the mystery of the workers. Still alive, Fergus had said. Something had harvested patches of weed. Something was producing the chemical traces that overlay the dragon's metabolic signature.

She realized then what the workers must be. What the laboratory had been used for. She turned and powered back into the rift. *** Finn's explosive charge had brought down a big ice fall, but the dragon had punched a hole in the middle of it. Indira shot straight through the ragged gap. She didn't have time to waste. The passage went a long way, rising in a gentle left-handed curve. It was as smooth as a gullet. The gleaming ice walls confused Indira's sonar, and she switched it off. The sniffer told her all she needed to know: increasing concentrations of the complex mixture of metabolic exudations, including the dragon's fingerprint of methylmalonic acid semialdehyde,?-ketoisovaleric acid, and a triple peak of phosphatidic acids. When the passage suddenly opened out on all sides, Indira slewed to a stop and fired off a fan of flares. They ignited as they floated away, a string of harsh white stars that starkly illuminated the lower half of a vast chamber. Indira's heart was beating quickly and lightly, driven by anticipation and dread. If this was not the monster's lair, then she was fucked. She didn't have enough air to get back out into open water. The flares floated higher. The chamber was easily twice the size of the Buddhist Temple in Phoenix. Chambers like this were common in the lower part of Europa's icy crust, opened by stress flow and carved wider by intrusive currents until they grew too big, even in Europa's low gravity, and collapsed. It was floored with chunks of ice that had fallen from the ceiling high above and fans of ice rubble slumped from the fluted walls. The chunks had been worn as smooth as pebbles by currents of relatively warm water. Movement at the edge of the shifting shadows cast by the string of floating flares sharpened the quick beat of her heart. Belatedly, she remembered to switch on her sonar. A cluster of small signals, things the size of a human child. Had the monster reproduced, then? Yes, but not more than once. That was why it had killed Finn. As for these ... She guessed what they must be a moment before she worked out that the regular signal beyond the cluster of child-sized creatures was that of a set of racks bolted to the ceiling of the chamber. Of course. They had started their own weed farm; the currents that flowed through the chamber were as rich in sulfides and ammonium as those in the open water. Then a big signal was suddenly coming straight at her, angling down like a guided missile, brushing through the picket line of flares and sending them spinning. She barely had time to get out her spear gun and aim it. There was a very fine tremor in her arms, but now that it was happening she was quite calm. The thing came on and she did not fire. It was so very fast! She did not fire, and at the last moment revved the scooter and shot under the monster as it swept over her. She rolled in its wake and brought up her spear gun again as she came around. The dragon had already turned. It hung there in the glare of her lights and the drifting stars of the flares.

She had seen pictures and brief video sequences of dragons, but she had never seen one in real life. No one had seen one in real life for more than ten years. Until now, she had not realized how beautiful they were. The dragon's body was streamlined and compact, a long wedge of muscle twice her length, gloved in a flexible carapace of long black bony scales. Its fused rear flippers fanned out horizontally like a whale's fluke, far wider than the span of her arms. Its pectoral fins were stretched out like bat's wings. Three of the long fingers grew through the thick membrane they supported; they were tipped with long, sharp, black claws. Its mouth was wide and had a shark's humorless grin, with several rows of backward-tilted ripsaw teeth. Not for feeding— it had no digestive system, fueling itself by pumping sulfide-rich water through internal lamellae dense with symbiotic carbon-fixing bacteria— but for attack. It was gaping wide now. Its forehead was humped and swollen, with a band of warty protrusions, electrical sensory organs on which it relied more than sight, although it kept one rolling blue eye on Indira. That eye was unnervingly human; she had the uncanny impression that someone was buried inside the monster's carapace, peering out at her. No, not at her, she realized. At the spear gun and the spear racked ready for firing, at the spear's explosive hypodermic tip, its charge of tailored neurotoxin. Even if it discharged into the water, the neurotoxin would be enough to paralyze the dragon, perhaps for long enough to kill it. If it could not pump sulfide-rich water over its symbionts, it could not generate energy, and after all this activity, it must have depleted the stored energy in its battery muscles. It would quickly die. Indira raised the spear gun and watched the dragon shift with precise flicks of its winglike pectoral fins, keeping its rolling blue eye on the tip of the cocked spear. For the first time in her life, she saw her quarry not as a monster, but as another thinking creature. Carefully, slowly, she inverted in the water and laid the spear gun amongst water-smoothed ice rubble on the floor. Came back right-side-up. The dragon hung there, watching her. Smaller shapes gathered high above and behind it, shadows moving to and fro against the guttering light of the flares, which had floated up amongst the hanging blocks of the ceiling. She could hear a faint chirruping of cross-talk. Still moving with dreamlike slowness, she took the emergency bottle from her scooter and vented it. The dragon sculled backward from the column of bubbles. Oxygen was poisonous to its symbiotic bacteria. But this was only nitrogen, and the dragon eased back to its original position. Still moving slowly, Indira took off her harness. She was careful not to tangle the hose that led from the one functional air-tank to the regulator in her face mask. She vented nitrogen from the second tank. This time the dragon did not shy back. It knew. The regulator valve rattled more deeply each time she drew a breath. The airtank was almost exhausted. She hung there in front of the monster, staring at its blue eye, small under the ridge of its swollen bony forehead. It must know that she was not like its enemies. Her dry suit was white and her stab jacket was yellow: compared to the monks' utilitarian black, she was a tropical bloom. And all biowar macroforms had a good sense of taste. It must be able to tell that she was releasing a different set of chemical signals into the cold water, that she was not a man.

The regulator rattled, and suddenly she could not breathe. It rattled again and her rib cage fully inflated, but she could not draw any air. She tried not to panic. She knew that she could hold her breath for more than three minutes. She tapped the regulator, tapped the air-tank. The monster watched, immobile, unfathomable. Indira stripped off her face mask, spat out her regulator and clamped her lips against the pressure of the freezing water. She wanted so much to breathe. A rapid fire of clicks and chirps. The cold salty water stung her eyes when she opened them. Something shot down, swooped between her and the dragon, dropped something, and shot away. Finn's harness and his air-tanks. Indira dove for it. The mouthpiece of the regulator was half-bitten through, and the air-tank it drew on was empty. She prayed that Finn had not switched over to his second tank before the dragon had killed him, jammed the regulator in her mouth, tasting Finn's blood and sputum, twisted the valve to the second tank, and drew a deep shuddering breath. A bullet of freezing cold sulfurous water hit the back of her throat. She choked on it, bubbles leaking from her mouth, and then realized that she was breathing again. More clicks tapped through the water. Small figures swooped down out of the darkness beyond and above the dragon. They hung in the black water on either side of its smooth bulk, gazing down as she hooked the hose of Finn's air-tank to her face mask and turned it on full to purge the mask of water as she fastened it over her face. They were half her size— Alice's size. Thick smooth coats of lustrous grey fur, sad brown human eyes, long vibrissae on either side of snouts swollen to the size of melons— they must rely on echo location as much as sight. They had the long, half-fused rear flippers of seals, but short, stout human arms where their pectoral flippers should be. Their hands were long-fingered, spread wide to show the webs between. The farm workers. The creatures Rothar had gengineered and used as slaves to increase the wealth of the monastery. The creatures that the dragon had freed. They clicked to each other using the flat, grinding teeth in their narrow jaws. They did not have the symbionts that fed the biowar macroforms. They needed to eat weed. They had to stay near the farm. But the dragon had shown them how they could live free. They could steal racks of weed and use them to start their own farm. The dragon moved forward. The long terminal finger of one of its pectoral fins scratched something on a table of ice. And then it flicked its body like a whip and shot away into the darkness. The workers trailed after it, kicking strongly through the water. One hovered for a moment, watching Indira, and then a sharp chorus of clicks sounded and it turned and followed its companions. Indira was alone. Cold and dark pressed all around the little bubble of light cast by her scooter's lamp. She finned over to the flat table of ice, traced the crude but legible letters the monster had gouged with its clawed finger.

No more war. *** Indira got back to the lock with less than an hour of air left. They had to let her in. She showed Finn's explosive charges to the cameras and mimed slapping them against the hatch to make it clear that she would blow her way in if she had to. Rothar came to her as soon as she had cycled through. A burly monk stood just behind him. Indira was cold and exhausted, and her dry suit stank of hydrogen sulfide, but she straightened her back and looked right at Rothar. She did not bother to look at the bodyguard. She said, "Finn is dead." "I know." "The dragon killed him. Your workers were with it. They gave me Finn's airtank. That's how I survived your attempt to kill me." She glared at Rothar defiantly. He was looking at a point somewhere behind her left shoulder. The dark blotches on his white face were vivid in the red light of the chamber. Only a slight tremor in his jaw betrayed the effort with which he was suppressing his emotions. Indira said in an angry rush, "You tried to steal my neurotoxins, but when you failed, you knew you would have to let me go after the dragon. And you wanted me out of the way after I saw the laboratory, but you couldn't just get rid of me— too many people knew I was here. So you sent me out without enough air. The plan was that either the dragon would kill me and Finn would take my spear gun and kill the dragon, or I would kill the dragon and run out of air, and Finn would mutilate my body to make it look like I'd been fatally wounded by the dragon." Rothar told his bodyguard to stand outside the door, and said mildly, "If you had given us the neurotoxins or let us take them, none of this would have happened." "You had to kill me after I found the laboratory." "Not at all. We tried to open your luggage pod as soon as you went outside to use your phone. But it was too well-defended and I had to implement a second plan. The only way to get your neurotoxins was to take them from you in the ocean, and the only way to take them from you was to kill you. I let you find the laboratory so that my community would condone your death because you had discovered our secrets." Indira was too tired to feel either hatred or fear. She said, "You were certain the dragon would kill me. You expected it. After all, I'm only a woman. Fergus was supposed to video my death. And if I did kill the dragon, then I couldn't be allowed to live because it would make a mockery of your creed. Either way, I had to die." Rothar did not deny it.

"Instead, the dragon took Finn because he had killed one of its scions. I don't know what happened to his body." "We will hold a service in memory of his soul." "Your workers have escaped you. They will start their own farm." Rothar said, "They will have to come back. They need certain vitamins and amino acids that the weed cannot provide. They know this." Perhaps they had eaten Finn's body. Or perhaps they had taken it with them. It would take a long time to even begin to decay in the cold anaerobic ocean. She said, "I don't think they'll be back." "Then I will raise some more." "And meanwhile, your farm will fail. And perhaps your new workers will escape, too. How intelligent did you make them?" Rothar smiled. "Intelligent enough." He paused. He said, "Not as intelligent as the dragons." She understood. She said, "You were a gengineer, on Earth." Rothar looked at her for a moment, looked away. He said, "I was part of a team, Ms. Dzurisin. Unfortunately, I was not working on the dragons, or I would not have needed your neurotoxin." "But you used that knowledge to gengineer your workers when you came here. Those blotches on your face— they're from some kind of accident, aren't they? You couldn't get it treated, because then people would know that you had been working illegally. Finn killed a dragon, a juvenile. At first, I thought you caught it because you wanted to learn the secret of how the macroforms can live off the ocean, but now I think he killed it because he could." "Finn was a useful man, but his propensity for violence could not always be contained. I did not need to learn any secret, Ms. Dzurisin. I already know how the dragons and the other biowar macroforms live. My workers are a type of macroform that was not used in the Quiet War. I altered their genotype to make them dependent on the weed they grow, but otherwise they are just as they were designed." "The dragon that sired the one Finn killed came here looking for its scion. And found the workers." Indira stared right at Rothar. She said, "I didn't kill it. But you'll want to pay me anyway." Rothar said, with a note of amusement, "I don't think so." "I think so. I found the dragon but I didn't kill it, and that's why you'll need me to negotiate with it." Rothar folded his arms. He said, "We will talk, in my study. Get changed, Ms. Dzurisin. Get warm. Think about what story you will tell your colleagues once you leave here." She knew then that she had won. ***

The bus pulled away from the monastery and began to descend the road that switchbacked down toward the plain. By human clocks, it was the middle of the night; on the surface of Europa, at 2°S 84°W, it was just after dawn. The small, shrunken Sun stood just above the flat eastern horizon. Above it, Jupiter showed a wide, narrow crescent, a bow of yellow light bent toward Europa. Out there, on the plain of ice plates cross-hatched by triple-banded ridges, everything had two shadows. The bus said, "Did you find the monster? Did you kill it?" "I found something else," Indira said. She thought of her daughter and her dreams of sea gardens full of benign animals. She thought of all the children of Phoenix, staring with avid fascination into the darkness of the ocean. She thought of the workers, and the monster that had adopted them. It was smarter than its makers knew. Perhaps it had learned wisdom in the black depths of the sea. Who knew what thoughts, what philosophies, the dragons spun as they hung in the cold and the dark and pumped life-giving water through symbiont-rich lamellae? Perhaps one day, Alice and her generation would find out. Indira would have to talk with the other hunters. There must be no more hunting for dragons. No more war. Perhaps they could help the workers, set up feeding stations where the creatures could get their dietary supplements of vitamins and essential amino acids. Perhaps they could learn the workers' chattering patois. Make contact. Cooperate. And begin to make the ocean a place in which to live. Indira said, "I think I might have found something that Earth can't do." The bus didn't understand. Indira wasn't sure that she did, either, but it didn't matter. Alice and all the other children would. Divided by Infinity ROBERT CHARLES WILSON Here's a tricky, brilliant, inventive story that brings you the glad news that you will never die. Well, then, in that case, you've got nothing to worry about, do you? Do you? Robert Charles Wilson made his first sale in 1974, to Analog, but little more was heard from him until the late eighties, when he began to publish a string of ingenious and well-crafted novels and stories that have since established him among the top ranks of the writers who came to prominence in the last two decades of the twentieth century. His first novel, A Hidden Place, appeared in 1986. He won the Philip K. Dick Award for his 1995 novel Mysterium, and the Aurora Award for his story "The Perseids." His other books include the novels Memory Wire, Gypsies, The Divide, The Harvest, and A Bridge of Years. His most recent book is a new novel, Darwinia, and he is currently working on another novel. He lives in Toronto, Canada. ONE In the year after Lorraine's death I contemplated suicide six times. Contemplated it seriously, I mean: six

times sat with the fat bottle of Clonazepam within reaching distance, six times failed to reach for it, betrayed by some instinct for life or disgusted by my own weakness. I can't say I wish I had succeeded, because in all likelihood I did succeed, on each and every occasion. Six deaths. No, not just six. An infinite number. Times six. There are greater and lesser infinities. But I didn't know that then. *** I was only sixty years old. I had lived all my life in the city of Toronto. I worked thirty-five years as a senior accountant for a Great Lakes cargo brokerage called Steamships Forwarding, Ltd., and took an early retirement in 1997, not long before Lorraine was diagnosed with the pancreatic cancer that killed her the following year. Back then she worked part-time in a Harbord Street used-book shop called Finders, a short walk from the university district, in a part of the city we both loved. I still loved it, even without Lorraine, though the gloss had dimmed considerably. I lived there still, in a utility apartment over an antique store, and I often walked the neighborhood— down Spadina into the candy-bright intricacies of Chinatown, or west to Kensington, foreign as a Bengali marketplace, where the smell of spices and ground coffee mingled with the stink of sun-ripened fish. Usually I avoided Harbord Street. My grief was raw enough without the provocation of the bookstore and its awkward memories. Today, however, the sky was a radiant blue, and the smell of spring blossoms and cut grass made the city seem threatless. I walked east from Kensington with a mesh bag filled with onions and Havarti cheese, and soon enough found myself on Harbord Street, which had moved another notch upscale since the old days, more restaurants now, fewer macrobiotic shops, the palm readers and bead shops banished for good and all. But Finders was still there. It was a tar-shingled Victorian house converted for retail, its hanging sign faded to illegibility. A three-legged cat slumbered on the cracked concrete stoop. I went in impulsively, but also because the owner, an old man by the name of Oscar Ziegler, had put in an appearance at Lorraine's funeral the previous year, and I felt I owed him some acknowledgement. According to Lorraine, he lived upstairs and seldom left the building. The bookstore hadn't changed on the inside, either, since the last time I had seen it. I didn't know it well (the store was Lorraine's turf and as a rule I had left her to it), but there was no obvious evidence that more than a year had passed since my last visit. It was the kind of shop with so much musty stock and so few customers that it could have survived only under the most generous circumstances— no doubt Ziegler owned the building and had found a way to finesse his property taxes. The store was not a labor of love, I suspected, so much as an excuse for Ziegler to indulge his pack-rat tendencies.

It was a full nest of books. The walls were pineboard shelves, floor to ceiling. Free-standing shelves divided the small interior into box canyons and dimly-lit hedgerows. The stock was old and, not that I'm any judge, largely trivial, forgotten jazz-age novels and belles-lettres, literary flotsam. I stepped past cardboard boxes from which more books overflowed, to the rear of the store, where a cash desk had been wedged against the wall. This was where, for much of the last five years of her life, Lorraine had spent her weekday afternoons. I wondered whether book dust was carcinogenic. Maybe she had been poisoned by the turgid air, by the floating fragments of ivoried Frank Yerby novels, vagrant molecules of Peyton Place and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. Someone else sat behind the desk now, a different woman, younger than Lorraine, though not what anyone would call young. A baby-boomer in denim overalls and a pair of eyeglasses that might have better suited the Hubble Space Telescope. Shoulder-length hair, gone gray, and an ingratiating smile, though there was something faintly haunted about the woman. "Hi," she said amiably. "Anything I can help you find?" "Is Oscar Ziegler around?" Her eyes widened. "Uh, Mr. Ziegler? He's upstairs, but he doesn't usually like to be disturbed. Is he expecting you?" She seemed astonished at the possibility that Ziegler would be expecting anyone, or that anyone would want to see Ziegler. Maybe it was a bad idea. "No," I said, "I just dropped by on the chance ... you know, my wife used to work here." "I see." "Please don't bother him. I'll just browse for a while." "Are you a book collector, or—?" "Hardly. These days I read the newspaper. The only books I've kept are old paperbacks. Not the sort of thing Mr. Ziegler would stock." "You'd be surprised. Mysteries? Chandler, Hammett, John Dickson Carr? Because we have some firsts over by the stairs...." "I used to read some mysteries. Mostly, though, it was science fiction I liked." "Really? You look more like a mystery reader." "There's a look?" She laughed. "Tell you what. Science fiction? We got a box of paperbacks in last week. Right over there, under the ladder. Check it out, and I'll tell Mr. Ziegler you're here. Uh—" "My name is Keller. Bill Keller. My wife was Lorraine." She held out her hand. "I'm Deirdre. Just have a look; I'll be back in a jiff."

I wanted to stop her but didn't know how. She went through a bead curtain and up a dim flight of stairs while I pulled a leathery cardboard box onto a chair seat and prepared for some dutiful time-killing. Certainly I didn't expect to find anything I wanted, though I would probably have to buy something as the price of a courtesy call, especially if Ziegler was coaxed out of his lair to greet me. But what I had told Deirdre was true; though I had been an eager reader in my youth, I hadn't bought more than an occasional softcover since 1970. Fiction is a young man's pastime. I had ceased to be curious about other people's lives, much less other worlds. Still, the box was full of forty-year-old softcover books, Ace and Ballantine paperbacks mainly, and it was nice to see the covers again, the Richard Powers abstracts, translucent bubbles on infinite plains, or Jack Gaughan sketches, angular and insectile. Titles rich with key words: Time, Space, Worlds, Infinity. Once I had loved this sort of thing. And then, amongst these faded jewels, I found something I did not expect— And another. And another. *** The bead curtain parted and Ziegler entered the room. He was a bulky man, but he moved with the exaggerated caution of the frail. A plastic tube emerged from his nose, was taped to his cheek with a dirty Band-Aid and connected to an oxygen canister slung from his shoulder. He hadn't shaved for a couple of days. He wore what looked like a velveteen frock coat draped over a T-shirt and a pair of pinstriped pajama-bottoms. His hair, what remained of it, was feathery and white. His skin was the color of thrift-shop Tupperware. Despite his appearance, he gave me a wide grin. "Mr. Ziegler," I said. "I'm Bill Keller. I don't know if you remember—" He thrust his pudgy hand forward. "Of course! No need to explain. Terrible about Lorraine. I think of her often." He turned to Deirdre, who emerged from the curtain behind him. "Mr. Keller's wife ..." He drew a labored breath. "Died last year." "I'm sorry," Deirdre said. "She was ... a wonderful woman. Friendly by nature. A joy. Of course, death isn't final ... we all go on, I believe, each in his own way...." There was more of this— enough that I regretted stopping by— but I couldn't doubt Ziegler's sincerity. Despite his intimidating appearance there was something almost willfully childlike about him, a kind of embalmed innocence, if that makes any sense. He asked how I had been and what I had been doing. I answered as cheerfully as I could and refrained from asking after his own health. His cheeks reddened as he stood, and I wondered if he shouldn't be sitting down. But he seemed to be enjoying himself. He eyed the five slender books I'd brought to the

cash desk. "Science fiction!" he said. "I wouldn't have taken you for a science fiction reader, Mr. Keller." (Deirdre glanced at me: Told you so!) "I haven't been a steady reader for a long time," I said. "But I found some interesting items." "The good old stuff," Ziegler gushed. "The pure quill. Does it strike you, Mr. Keller, that we live every day in the science fiction of our youth?" "I hadn't noticed." "There was a time when science seemed so sterile. It didn't yield up the wonders we had been led to expect. Only a bleak, lifeless solar system ... a half-dozen desert worlds, baked or frozen, take your pick, and the gas giants ... great roaring seas of methane and ammonia ..." I nodded politely. "But now!" Ziegler exclaimed. "Life on Mars! Oceans under Europa! Comets plunging into Jupiter—!" "I see what you mean." "And here on Earth— the human genome, cloned animals, mind-altering drugs! Computer networks! Computer viruses!" He slapped his thigh. "I have a Teflon hip, if you can imagine such a thing!" "Pretty amazing," I agreed, though I hadn't thought much about any of this. "Back when we read these books, Mr. Keller, when we read Heinlein or Simak or Edmond Hamilton, we longed to immerse ourselves in the strange ... the outré. And now— well— here we are!" He smiled breathlessly and summed up his thesis. "Immersed in the strange. All it takes is time. Just ... time. Shall I put these in a bag for you?" He bagged the books without looking at them. When I fumbled out my wallet, he raised his hand. "No charge. This is for Lorraine. And to thank you for stopping by." I couldn't argue ... and I admit I didn't want to draw his attention to the paperbacks, in the petty fear that he might notice how unusual they were and refuse to part with them. I took the paper bag from his parchment hand, feeling faintly guilty. "Perhaps you'll come back," he said. "I'd like to." "Anytime," Ziegler said, inching toward his bead curtain and the musty stairway behind it, back into the cloying dark. "Anything you're looking for, I can help you find it." ***

Crossing College Street, freighted with groceries, I stepped into the path of a car, a yellow Hyundai racing a red light. The driver swerved around me, but it was a near thing. The wheel wells brushed my trouser legs. My heart stuttered a beat. ... and I died, perhaps, a small infinity of times. Probabilities collapse. I become increasingly unlikely. "Immersed in the strange," Ziegler had said. But had I ever wanted that? Really wanted that? *** "Be careful," Lorraine told me one evening in the long month before she died. Amazingly, she had seemed to think of it as my tragedy, not hers. "Don't despise life." Difficult advice. Did I "despise life"? I think I did not; that is, there were times when the world seemed a pleasant enough place, times when a cup of coffee and a morning in the sun seemed a good enough reason to continue to draw breath. I remained capable of smiling at babies. I was even able to look at an attractive young woman and feel a response more immediate than nostalgia. But I missed Lorraine terribly, and we had never had children, neither of us had any close living relations or much in the way of friends; I was unemployed and unemployable, confined forevermore within the contracting walls of my pension and our modest savings ... all the joy and much of the simple structure of my life had been leeched away, and the future looked like more of the same, a protracted fumble toward the grave. If anything postponed the act of suicide it wasn't courage or principle but the daily trivia. I would kill myself (I decided more than once), but not until after the news ... not until I paid the electric bill ... not until I had taken my walk. Not until I solved the mystery I'd brought home from Finders. I won't describe the books in detail. They looked more or less like others of their kind. What was strange about them was that I didn't recognize them, although this was a genre (paperback science fiction of the 1950s and '60s) I had once known in intimate detail. The shock was not just unfamiliarity, since I might have missed any number of minor works by minor writers; but these were major novels by well-known names, not re-titled works or variant editions. A single example: I sat down that night with a book called The Stone Pillow, by a writer whose identity any science fiction follower would instantly recognize. It was a Signet paperback circa 1957, with a cover by the artist Paul Lehr in the period style. According to the credit slug, the story had been serialized in Astounding in 1946. The pages were browned at the margins; the glued spine was brittle as bone china. I handled the book carefully, but I couldn't resist reading it, and insofar as I was able to

judge it was a plausible example of the late author's well-known style and habits of thought. I enjoyed it a great deal and went to bed convinced of its authenticity. Either I had missed it, somehow— in the days when not missing such things meant a great deal to me— or it had slipped out of memory. No other explanation presented itself. One such item wouldn't have worried me. But I had brought home four more volumes equally inexplicable. Chalk it up to age, I thought. Or worse. Senility. Alzheimer's. Either way, a bad omen. Sleep was elusive. The next logical step might have been to see a doctor. Instead, the next morning I thumbed through the yellow pages for a used-book dealer who specialized in period science fiction. After a couple of calls I reached a young man named Niemand who offered to evaluate the books if I brought them to him that afternoon. I told him I'd be there by one. If nothing else, it was an excuse to prolong my life one more interminable day. *** Niemand— his store was an overheated second-story loft over a noisy downtown street— gave the books a long, thoughtful examination. "Fake," he said finally. "They're fake." "Fake? You mean ... counterfeit?" "If you like, but that's stretching a point. Nobody counterfeits books, even valuable books. The idea is ludicrous. I mean, what do you do, set up a press and go through all the work of producing a bound volume, duplicate the type, flaws and all, and then flog it on the collector's market? You'd never recoup your expenses, not even if you came up with a convincing Gutenberg Bible. In the case of books like this the idea's doubly absurd. Maybe if they were one-off from an abandoned print run or something, but hell, people would know about that. Nope. Sorry, but these are just ... fake." "But— well, obviously, somebody did go to the trouble of faking them." He nodded. "Obviously. It's flawless work, and it can't have been cheap. And the books are genuinely old. Contemporary fakes, maybe ... maybe some obsessive fan with a big disposable income, rigging up books he wanted to exist...." "Are they valuable?" "They're certainly odd. Valuable? Not to me. Tell you the truth, I kind of wish you hadn't brought them in."

"Why?" "They're creepy. They're too good. Kind of X-Files." He gave me a sour grin. "Make up your own science fiction story." "Or live in it," I said. We live in the science fiction of our youth. He pushed the books across his cluttered desk. "Take 'em away, Mr. Keller. And if you find out where they came from—" "Yes?" "I really don't want to know." *** Items I noticed in the newspaper that evening: GENE THERAPY RENDERS HEART BYPASS OBSOLETE BANK OF ZURICH FIRST WITH QUANTUM ENCRYPTION SETI RESEARCHERS SPOT "POSSIBLE" ET RADIO SOURCE I didn't want to go back to Ziegler, not immediately. It felt like admitting defeat— like looking up the answer to a magazine puzzle I couldn't solve. But there was no obvious next step to take, so I put the whole thing out of my mind, or tried to; watched television, did laundry, shined my shoes. None of this pathetic sleight-of-hand provided the slightest distraction. I was not (just as I had told Deirdre) a mystery lover, and I didn't love this mystery, but it was a turbulence in the flow of the passing days, therefore interesting. When I had savored the strangeness of it to a satisfying degree I took myself in hand and carried the books back to Finders, meaning to demand an explanation. Oscar Ziegler was expecting me. The late-May weather was already too humid, a bright sun bearing down from the ozone-depleted sky. Walking wasn't such a pleasure under the circumstances. I arrived at Finders plucking my shirt away from my body. Graceless. The woman Deirdre looked up from her niche at the rear of the store. "Mr. Keller, right?" She didn't seem especially pleased to see me. I meant to ask if Ziegler was available, but she waved me off: "He said if you showed up you were to go on upstairs. That's, uh, really unusual."

"Shouldn't you let him know I'm here?" "Really, he's expecting you." She waved at the bead curtain, almost a challenge: Go on, if you must. The curtain made a sound like chattering teeth behind me. The stairway was dim. Dustballs quivered on the risers and clung to the threadbare coco-mat tread. At the top was a door silted under so many layers of ancient paint that the moulding had softened into gentle dunes. Ziegler opened the door and waved me in. His room was lined with books. He stepped back, settled himself into an immense overstuffed easy chair, and invited me to look at his collection. But the titles at eye level were disappointing. They were old cloth volumes of Gurdjieff and Ouspenski, Velikovsky and Crowley— the usual pseudo-gnostic spiritualist bullshit, pardon my language. Like the room itself, the books radiated dust and boredom. I felt obscurely disappointed. So this was Oscar Ziegler, one more pathetic old man with a penchant for magic and cabbalism. Between the books, medical supplies: inhalers, oxygen tanks, pill bottles. Ziegler might be old, but his eyesight was still keen. "Judging by the expression on your face, you find my den distasteful." "Not at all." "Oh, fess up, Mr. Keller. You're too old to be polite and I'm too old to pretend I don't notice." I gestured at the books. "I was never much for the occult." "That's understandable. It's claptrap, really. I keep those volumes for nostalgic reasons. To be honest, there was a time when I looked there for answers. That time is long past." "I see." "Now tell me why you came." I showed him the softcover books, told him how I'd taken them to Niemand for a professional assessment. Confessed my own bafflement. Ziegler took the books into his lap. He looked at them briefly and took a long drag from his oxygen mask. He didn't seem especially impressed. "I'm hardly responsible for every volume that comes into the store." "Of course not. And I'm not complaining. I just wondered—" "If I knew where they came from? If I could offer you a meaningful explanation?" "Basically, yes." "Well," Ziegler said. "Well. Yes and no. Yes and no."

"I'm sorry?" "That is ... no, I can't tell you precisely where they came from. Deirdre probably bought them from someone off the street. Cash or credit, and I don't keep detailed records. But it doesn't really matter." "Doesn't it?" He took another deep drag from the oxygen bottle. "Oh, it could have been anyone. Even if you tracked down the original vendor— which I guarantee you won't be able to do— you wouldn't learn anything useful." "You don't seem especially surprised by this." "Implying that I know more than I'm saying." He smiled ruefully. "I've never been in this position before, though you're right, it doesn't surprise me. Did you know, Mr. Keller, that I am immortal?" Here we go, I thought. The pitch. Ziegler didn't care about the books. I had come for an explanation; he wanted to sell me a religion. "And you, Mr. Keller. You're immortal, too." What was I doing here, in this shabby place with this shabby old man? There was nothing to say. "But I can't explain it," Ziegler went on; "that is, not in the depth it deserves. There's a volume here— I'll lend it to you—" He stood, precariously, and huffed across the room. I looked at his books again while he rummaged for the volume in question. Below the precambrian deposits of the occult was a small sediment of literature. First editions, presumably valuable. And not all familiar. Had Ernest Hemingway written a book called Pamplona? (But here it was, its Scribners dust jacket protected in brittle Mylar.) Cromwell and Company, by Charles Dickens? Under the Absolute, by Aldous Huxley? "Ah, books." Ziegler, smiling, came up behind me. "They bob like corks on an ocean. Float between worlds, messages in bottles. This will tell you what you need to know." The book he gave me was cheaply made, with a utilitarian olive-drab jacket. You Will Never Die, by one Carl G. Soziere. "Come back when you've read it." "I will," I lied. *** "I had a feeling," Deirdre said, "you'd come downstairs with one of those."

The Soziere book. "You've heard of it?" "Not until I took this job. Mr. Ziegler gave me a copy. But I speak from experience. Every once in a long while, somebody comes in with a question or a complaint. They go upstairs. And they come back down with that." At which point I realized I had left the paperbacks in Ziegler's room. I suppose I could have gone back for them, but it seemed somehow churlish. But it was a loss. Not that I loved the books, particularly, but they were the only concrete evidence I had of the mystery— they were the mystery. Now Ziegler had them back in his possession. And I had You Will Never Die. "It looks like a crank book." "Oh, it is," Deirdre said. "Kind of a parallel-worlds argument, you know, J. W. Dunne and so on, with some quantum physics thrown in; actually, I'm surprised a major publisher didn't pick it up." "You've read it?" "I'm a sucker for that kind of thing, if you want the truth." "Don't tell me. It changed your life." I was smiling. She smiled back. "It didn't even change my mind." But there was an odd note of worry in her voice. *** Of course I read it. Deirdre was right about You Will Never Die. It had been published by some private or vanity press, but the writing wasn't crude. It was slick, even witty in places. And the argument was seductive. Shorn of the babble about Planck radii and Prigogine complexity and the Dancing Wu-Li Masters, it came down to this: Consciousness, like matter, like energy, is preserved. You are born, not an individual, but an infinity of individuals, in an infinity of identical worlds. "Consciousness," your individual awareness, is shared by this infinity of beings. At birth (or at conception; Soziere wasn't explicit), this span of selves begins to divide, as alternate possibilities are indulged or rejected. The infant turns his head not to the left or to the right, but both. One infinity of worlds becomes two; then four; then eight, and so on, exponentially. But the underlying essence of consciousness continues to connect all these disparate possibilities.

The upshot? Soziere says it all in his title. You cannot die. Consider. Suppose, tomorrow afternoon, you walk in front of a speeding eighteen-wheeler. The grillwork snaps your neck and what remains of you is sausaged under the chassis. Do you die? Well, yes; an infinity of you does die; but infinity is divisible by itself. Another infinity of you steps out of the path of the truck, or didn't leave the house that day, or recovers in hospital. The you-ness of you doesn't die; it simply continues to reside in those remnant selves. An infinite set has been subtracted from infinity; but what remains, remains infinite. The subjective experience is that the accident simply doesn't happen. Consider that bottle of Clonazepam I keep beside the bed. Six times I reached for it, meaning to kill myself. Six times stopped myself. In the great wilderness of worlds, I must have succeeded more often than I failed. My cold and vomit-stained corpse was carted off to whatever grave or urn awaits it, and a few acquaintances briefly mourned. But that's not me. By definition, you can't experience your own death. Death is the end of consciousness. And consciousness persists. In the language of physics, consciousness is conserved. I am the one who wakes up in the morning. Always. Every morning. I don't die. I just become increasingly unlikely. *** I spent the next few days watching television, folding laundry, trimming my nails— spinning my wheels. I tossed Soziere's little tome into a corner and left it there. And when I was done kidding myself, I went to see Deirdre. I didn't even know her last name. All I knew was that she had read Soziere's book and remained skeptical of it, and I was eager to have my own skepticism refreshed. You think odd things, sometimes, when you're too often alone. I caught Deirdre on her lunch break. Ziegler didn't come downstairs to man the desk; the store simply

closed between noon and one every weekday. The May heat wave had broken; the sky was a soft, deep blue, the air balmy. We sat at a sidewalk table outside a lunch-and-coffee restaurant. Her full name was Deirdre Frank. She was fifty and unmarried and had run her own retail business until some legal difficulty closed her down. She was working at Finders while she reorganized her life. And she understood why I had come to her. "There's a couple of tests I apply," she said, "whenever I read this kind of book. First, is it likely to improve anyone's life? Which is a trickier question than it sounds. Any number of people will tell you they found happiness with the Scientologists or the Moonies or whatever, but what that usually means is they narrowed their focus— they can't see past the bars of their cage. Okay, You Will Never Die isn't a cult book, but I doubt it will make anybody a better person." "Second, is there any way to test the author's claims? Soziere aced that one beautifully, I have to admit. His argument is that there's no subjective experience of death— your family might die, your friends, your grade-school teachers, the Princess of Wales, but never you. And in some other world, you die and other people go on living. How do you prove such a thing? Obviously, you can't. What Soziere tries to do is infer it, from quantum physics and lots of less respectable sources. It's a bubble theory— it floats over the landscape, touching nothing." I was probably blushing by this time. Deirdre said, "You took it seriously, didn't you? Or half seriously ..." "Half at most. I'm not stupid. But it's an appealing idea." Her eyes widened. "Appealing?" "Well— there are people who've died. People I miss. I like to think of them going on somewhere, even if it isn't a place I can reach." She was aghast. "God, no! Soziere's book isn't a fairy tale, Mr. Keller— it's a horror story!" "Pardon me?" "Think about it! At first it sounds like an invitation to suicide. You don't like where you are, put a pistol in your mouth and go somewhere else— somewhere better, maybe, even if it is inherently less likely. But take you for example. You're what, sixty years old? Or so? Well, great, you inhabit a universe where a healthy human being can obtain the age of sixty, fine, but what next? Maybe you wake up tomorrow morning and find out they cured cancer, say, or heart disease— excluding you from all the worlds where William Keller dies of a colon tumor or an aneurism. And then? You're a hundred years old, a hundred and twenty— do you turn into some kind of freak? So unlikely, in Soziere's sense, that you end up in a circus or a research ward? Do they clone you a fresh body? Do you end up as some kind of half-human robot, a brain in a bottle? And in the meantime the world changes around you, everything familiar is left behind, you see others die, maybe millions of others, maybe the human race dies out or evolves into something else, and you go on, and on, while the universe groans under the weight of your unlikeliness, and there's no escape, every death is just another rung up the ladder of weirdness and disorientation...." I hadn't thought of it that way.

Yes, the reductio ad absurdum of Soziere's theory was a kind of relativistic paradox: as the observer's life grows more unlikely, he perceives the world around him becoming proportionately more strange; and down those unexplored, narrow rivers of mortality might well lie a cannibal village. Or the Temple of Gold. What if Deirdre was too pessimistic? What if, among all the unlikely worlds, there was one in which Lorraine had survived her cancer? Wouldn't that be worth waiting for? Worth looking for, no matter how strange the consequences might be? *** News items that night: NEURAL IMPLANTS RESTORE VISION IN FIFTEEN PATIENTS "TELOMERASE COCKTAIL" CREATES IMMORTAL LAB MICE TWINNED NEUTRON STARS POSE POTENTIAL THREAT, NASA SAYS My sin was longing. Not grief. Grief isn't a sin, and is anyway unavoidable. Yes, I grieved for Lorraine, grieved long and hard, but I don't remember having a choice. I miss her still. Which is as it should be. But I had given in too often to the vulgar yearnings. Mourned youth, mourned better days. Made an old man's map of roads not taken, from the stale perspective of a dead end. Reached for the Clonazepam and turned my hand away, freighted every inch with deaths beyond counting. I wonder if my captors understand this? *** I went back to Ziegler— nodding at Deirdre, who was disappointed to see me, as I vanished behind the bead curtain. "This doesn't explain it." I gave him back You Will Never Die. "Explain," Ziegler said guilelessly, "what?"

"The paperbacks I bought from you." "I don't recall." "Or these—" I turned to his bookshelf. Copies of In Our Time, Our Mutual Friend, Beyond the Mexique Bay. "I didn't realize they needed explaining." I was the victim of a conjuror's trick, gulled and embarrassed. I closed my mouth. "Anomalous experience," Ziegler said knowingly. "You're right, Soziere doesn't explain it. Personally I think there must be a kind of critical limit— a degree of accumulated unlikeliness so great that the illusion of normalcy can no longer be wholly sustained." He smiled, not pleasantly. "Things leak. I think especially books, books being little islands of mind. They trail their authors across phenomenological borders, like lost puppies. That's why I love them. But you're awfully young to experience such phenomena. You must have made yourself very unlikely indeed— more and more unlikely, day after day! What have you been doing to yourself, Mr. Keller?" I left him sucking oxygen from a fogged plastic mask. *** Reaching for the bottle of Clonazepam. Drawing back my hand. But how far must the charade proceed? Does the universe gauge intent? What if I touch the bottle? What if I open it and peer inside? (These questions, of course, are answered now. I have only myself to blame.) *** I had tumbled a handful of the small white tablets into my hand and was regarding them with the cool curiosity of an entomologist when the telephone rang. Pills or telephone? Both, presumably, in Soziere's multiverse. I answered the phone. It was Deirdre. "He's dead," she told me. "Ziegler. I thought you should know."

I said, "I'm sorry." "I'm taking care of the arrangements. He was so alone ... no family, no friends, just nothing." "Will there be a service?" "He wanted to be cremated. You're welcome to come. It might be nice if somebody besides me showed up." "I will. What about the store?" "That's the crazy part. According to the bank, he left it to me." Her voice was choked with emotion. "Can you imagine that? I never even called him by his first name! To be honest— oh, God, I didn't even like him! Now he leaves me this tumbledown business of his!" I told her I'd see her at the mortuary. *** I paid no attention to the news that night, save to register the lead stories, which were ominous and strange. We live, Ziegler had said, in the science fiction of our youth. The "ET signals" NASA scientists had discovered were, it turned out, a simple star map, at the center of which was— not the putative aliens' home world— but a previously undiscovered binary neutron star in the constellation Orion. The message, one astronomer speculated, might be a warning. Binary neutron stars are unstable. When they eventually collide, drawn together by their enormous gravity, the collision produces a black hole— and in the process a burst of gamma rays and cosmic radiation, strong enough to scour the Earth of life if the event occurs within some two or three thousand light-years of us. The freshly discovered neutron stars were well within that range. As for the collision, it might happen in ten years, a thousand, ten thousand— none of the quoted authorities would commit to a date, though estimates had been shrinking daily. Nice of our neighbors to warn us, I thought. But how long had that warning bell been ringing, and for how many centuries had we ignored it? *** Deirdre's description of the Soziere book as a "bubble theory" haunted me. No proof, no evidence could exist: that was ruled out by the theory itself— or at least, as Ziegler had

implied, there would be no evidence one could share. But there had been evidence, at least in my case: the paperback books, "anomalous" books imported, presumably, from some other timeline, a history I had since lost to cardiac arrest, a car accident, Clonazepam. But the books were gone. I had traded them, in effect, for You Will Never Die. Which I had returned to Oscar Ziegler. Cup your hands as you might. The water runs through your fingers. There was only the most rudimentary service at the crematorium where Ziegler's body was burned. A few words from an Episcopal minister Deirdre had hired for the occasion, an earnest young man in clerical gear and neatly pressed Levis who pronounced his consolations and hurried away as if late for another function. Deirdre said, afterward, "I don't know if I've been given a gift or an obligation. For a man who never left his room, Mr. Ziegler had a way of weaving people into his life." She shook her head sadly. "If any of it really matters. I mean, if we're not devoured by aliens or god knows what. You can't turn on the news these days.... Well, I guess he bailed out just in time." Or moved on. Moved someplace where his emphysema was curable, his failing heart reparable, his aging cells regenerable. Shunting the train Oscar Ziegler along a more promising if less plausible track ... "The evidence," I said suddenly. "What?" "The books I told you about." "Oh. Right. Well, I'm sorry, but I didn't get a good look at them." She frowned. "Is that what you're thinking? Oh, shit, that fucking Soziere book of his! It's bait, Mr. Keller, don't you get it? Not to speak ill of the dead, but he loved to suck people into whatever cloistered little mental universe he inhabited, misery loves company, and that book was always the bait—" "No," I said, excited despite my best intentions, as if Ziegler's cremation had been a message, his personal message to me, that the universe discarded bodies like used Kleenex but that consciousness was continuous, seamless, immortal.... "I mean about the evidence. You didn't see it— but someone did." "Leave it alone. You don't understand about Ziegler. Oscar Ziegler was a sour, poisonous old man. Maybe older than he looked. That's what I thought of when I read Soziere's book: Oscar Ziegler, someone so ridiculously old that he wakes up every morning surprised he's still a human being." She stared fiercely at me. "What exactly are you contemplating here— serial suicide?" "Nothing so drastic." I thanked her and left.

*** The paradox of proof. I went to Niemand's store as soon as I left Deirdre. I had shown the books to Niemand, the book dealer. He was the impossible witness, the corroborative testimony. If Niemand had seen the books, then I was sane; if Niemand had seen the books they might well turn up among Ziegler's possessions, and I could establish their true provenance and put all this dangerous Soziere mythology behind me. But Niemand's little second-story loft store had closed. The sign was gone. The door was locked and the space was for lease. Neither the jeweller downstairs nor the coffee-shop girl next door remembered the store, its clientele, or Niemand himself. There was no Niemand in the phone book. Nor could I find his commercial listing. Not even in my yellow pages at home, where I had first looked it up. Or remembered looking it up. Anomalous experience. Which constituted proof, of a kind, though Ziegler was right; it was not transferable. I could convince no one, ultimately, save myself. *** The television news was full of apocalypse that night. A rumor had swept the Internet that the great gamma-ray burst was imminent, only days away. No, it was not, scientists insisted, but they allowed themselves to be drawn by their CNN inquisitors into hypothetical questions. Would there be any safe place? A half-mile underground, say, or two, or three? (Probably not, they admitted; or, We don't have the full story yet.) To a man, or woman, they looked unsettled and skittish. I went to bed knowing she was out there, Lorraine, I mean, out among the plenitude of worlds and stars. Alone, perhaps, since I must have died to her— infinities apart, certainly, but enclosed within the same inconceivably vast multi-universe, as alike, in our way, as two snowflakes in an avalanche. I slept with the pill bottle cradled in my hand. *** The trick, I decided, was to abandon the charade, to mean the act.

In other words, to swallow twenty or thirty tablets— a more difficult act than you might imagine— and wash them down with a neat last shot of Glenlivet. *** But Deirdre called. Almost too late. Not late enough. I picked up the phone, confused, my hands butting the receiver like antagonistic parade balloons. I said, or meant to say, "Lorraine?" But it was Deirdre, only Deirdre, and before long Deirdre was shouting in an annoying way. I let the phone drop. I suppose she called 911. TWO I woke in a hospital bed. I lay there passively for more than an hour, by the digital clock on the bedstand, cresting waves of sleep and wondering at the silence, until I was visited by Candice. Her name was written on her lapel tag. Candice was a nurse, with a throaty Jamaican accent and wide, sad eyes. "You're awake," she said, barely glancing at me. My head hurt. My mouth tasted of ashes and quicklime. I needed to pee, but there was a catheter in the way. "I think I want to see a doctor," I managed. "Prob'ly you do," Candice agreed. "And prob'ly you should. But our last resident went home yesterday. I can take the catheter out, if that's what you want." "There are no doctors?" "Home with their families like everybody else." She fluffed my pillow. "Only us pathetic lonelyhearts left, Mr. Keller. You been unconscious ten days." Later she wheeled me down the corridor— though I insisted I could have walked— to a lounge with a tall plate glass window, where the ward's remaining patients had gathered to talk and weep and watch the fires that burned fitfully through the downtown core.

Soziere's curse. We become— or we make ourselves— less "likely." But it's not our own unlikeliness we perceive; instead, we see the world growing strange around us. The lights are out all over the city. The hospital, fortunately, has its own generator. I tried to call Deirdre from a hospital phone, but there was no dial tone, just a crackling hiss, like the last groove in an LP record. *** The previous week's newspapers, stacked by the door of the hospital lounge, were dwindling broadsheets containing nothing but stark outlines of the impending gamma-ray disaster. The extraterrestrial warning had been timely. Timely, though we read it far too late. Apparently it not only identified the threatening binary neutron stars— which were spiralling at last into gaudy destruction, about to emit a burst of radiation brighter than a billion galaxies— but provided a calculable time scale. A countdown, in other words, which had already closed in on its ultimate zero. Too close to home, a black hole was about to be born. None of us would survive that last flash of annihilating fire. Or, at least, if we did, we would all become extremely unlikely. *** I remember a spot of blue luminescence roughly the size of a dinner plate at arm's length, suspended above the burning city: Cherenkov radiation. Gamma rays fractured molecules in the upper atmosphere, loading the air with nitric oxides the color of dried blood. The sky was frying like a bad picture tube. The hard, ionizing radiation would arrive within hours. Cosmic rays striking the wounded atmosphere would trigger particle cascades, washing the crust of the Earth with what the papers called "high energy muons." I was tired of the ward lounge, the incessant weeping and periodic shouting. Candice took me aside. "I'll tell you," she said, "what I told the others. I been into the medicine cupboard. If you don't want to wait, there are pills you can take." The air smelled suddenly of burning plastic. Static electricity drew bright blue sparks from metal shelves and gurney carts. Surely this would be the end: the irrevocable death, the utter annihilation, if there can ever be an end. I told Candice a nightcap might be a good idea, and she smiled wanly and brought me the pills. THREE

They want me to keep on with my memoirs. They take the pages away from me, exchange them for greater rations of food. The food is pale, chalky, with the claylike texture of goat cheese. They excrete it from a sort of spinerette, white obscene lumps of it, like turds. I prefer to think of them as advanced machines rather than biological entities— vending machines, say, not the eight-foot-long centipedes they appear to be. They've mastered the English language. (I don't know how.) They say "please" and "thank you." Their voices are thin and reedy, a sound like tree branches creaking on a windy winter night. They tell me I've been dead for ten thousand years. *** Today they let me out of my bubble, let me walk outside, with a sort of mirrored umbrella to protect me from the undiluted sunlight. The sunlight is intense, the air cold and thin. They have explained, in patient but barely intelligible whispers, that the gamma ray burst and subsequent bath of cosmic radiation stripped the earth of its ozone layer as well as much of the upper atmosphere. The oxygen that remains, they say, is "fossil" oxygen, no longer replenished. The soil is alive with radioactive nuclei: samarium 146, iodine 129, isotopes of lead, of plutonium. There is no macroscopic life on Earth. Present company excepted. Everything died. People, plants, plankton, everything but the bacteria inhabiting the rocks of the deep mantle or the scalding water around undersea volcanic vents. The surface of the planet— here, at least— has been scoured by wind and radiation into a rocky desert. All this happened ten thousand years ago. The sun shines placidly on the lifeless soil, the distant blue-black mountains. Everything I loved is dead. *** I can't imagine the technology they used to resurrect me, to re-create me, as they insist, from desiccated fragments of biological tissue tweezed from rocks. It's not just my DNA they have recovered but (apparently, somehow) my memories, my self, my consciousness. I suppose Carl Soziere wouldn't be surprised. I ask about others, other survivors reclaimed from the waterless desert. My captors (or saviours) only spindle their sickeningly mobile bodies: a gesture of negation, I've come to understand, the equivalent of a

shake of the head. There are no other survivors. And yet I can't help wondering whether Lorraine waits to be salvaged from her grave— some holographic scrap of her, at least; information scattered by time, like the dust of an ancient book. *** There is nothing in my transparent cell but bowls of water and food, a floor soft enough to serve as a mattress, and the blunted writing instruments and clothlike paper. (Are they afraid I might commit suicide?) The memoirs run out. I want the extra food, and I enjoy the diversion of writing, but what remains to be said? And to whom? *** I've learned to distinguish between my captors. The "leader" (that is, the individual most likely to address me directly and see that others attend to my needs) is a duller shade of silver-white, his cartilaginous shell dusted with fine powder. He (or she) possesses many orifices, all visible when he sways back to speak. I have identified his speaking-orifice and his food-excreting orifice, but there are three others I haven't seen in use, including a tooth-lined maw that must be a kind of mouth. "We are the ones who warned you," he tells me. "For half of a million years we warned you. If you had known, you might have protected yourself." His grammar is impeccable, to my ears anyway, although consonants in close proximity make him stumble and hiss. "You might have deconstructed your moon, created a shield, as we did. Numerous strategies might have succeeded in preserving your world." The tocsin had sounded, in other words, for centuries. We had simply been too dull to interpret it, until the very end, when nothing could be done to counter the threat. I try not interpret this as a rebuke. "Now we have learned to transsect distance," the insectile creature explains. "Then, we could only signal." I ask whether he could re-create the Earth, revive the dead. "No," he says. Perhaps the angle of his body signifies regret. "One of you is puzzle enough." *** They live apart from me, in an immense silver half-sphere embedded in the alkaline soil. Their spaceship?

For a day they haven't come. I sit alone in my own much smaller shelter, its bubble walls polarized to filter the light but transparent enough to show the horizon with vicious clarity. I feel abandoned, a fly on a vast pane of dusty glass. And hungry. And thirsty. *** They return— apologetically— with water, with paper and writing implements, and with a generous supply of food, thoughtfully pre-excreted. They are compiling, they tell me, a sort of interstellar database, combining the functions of library, archeological museum, and telephone exchange. They are most grateful for my writings, which have been enthusiastically received. "Your cosmology," by which they must mean Soziere's cosmology, "is quite distinctive." I thank them but explain that there is nothing more to write— and no audience I can even begin to imagine. The news perplexes them. The leader asks, "Do you need a human audience?" Yes. Yes, that's what I need. A human audience. Lorraine, warning me away from despair, or even Deirdre, trying vainly to shield me from black magic. They confer for another day. I walk outside my bubble at sunset, alone, with my silver umbrella tilted toward the western horizon. When the stars appear, they are astonishingly bright and crisp. I can see the frosted breath of the Milky Way. *** "We cannot create a human audience for you," the leader says, swaying in a chill noon breeze like a stately elm. "But there is perhaps a way." I wait. I am infinitely patient. "We have experimented with time," the creature announces. Or I think the word is "experimented." It might as easily have been the clacking buzz of a cricket or a cicada. "Send me back," I demand at once. "No, not you, not physical objects. It cannot be done. Thoughts, perhaps. Dreams. Speaking to minds long dead. Of course, it changes nothing." I rather like the idea— when they explain it— of my memoirs circulating through the Terrestrial past, appearing fragmented and unintelligible among the night terrors of Neanderthals, Cro-Magnons, Roman slaves, Chinese peasants, science fiction writers, drunken poets. And Deirdre Frank, and Oscar Ziegler. And Lorraine.

Even the faintest touch— belated, impossible— is better than none at all. But still. I find it difficult to write. "In that case," the leader says, "we would like to salvage you." "Salvage me?" They consult in their own woody, windy language, punctuated by long silences or sounds I cannot hear. "Preserve you," they conclude. "Yourself. Your soul." And how would they do that? "I would take you into my body," the leader says. Eat me, in other words. They have explained this more than once. Devour my body, hoc est corpus, and spit out my soul like a cherry pit into the great galactic telephone exchange. "But this is how we must do it," the leader says apologetically. *** I don't fear them. I take a long last walk, at night, bundled against the cold in layers of flexible foil. The stars have not changed visibly in the ten thousand years of my absence, but there is nothing else familiar, no recognizable landmarks, I gather, anywhere on the surface of the planet. This might be an empty lakebed, this desert of mine, saline and ancient and, save for the distant mountains, flat as a chessboard. I don't fear them. They might be lying, I know, although I doubt it; surely not even the most alien of creatures would travel hundreds of light-years to a dead planet in search of a single exotic snack. I do fear their teeth, however, sharp as shark's teeth, even if (as they claim) their bodies secrete an anaesthetic and euphoriant venom. And death? I don't fear death. I dread the absence of it. *** Maybe Soziere was wrong. Maybe there's a teleological escape clause, maybe all the frayed threads of time will be woven back together at the end of the world, assembled in the ultimate library, where all the

books and all the dreams are preserved and ordered in their multiple infinities. Or not. I think, at last, of Lorraine: really think of her, I mean; imagine her next to me, whispering that I ought to have taken her advice, not lodged this grief so close to my heart; whispering that death is not a door through which I can follow her, no matter how hard or how often I try.... "Will you accept me?" the leader asks, rearing up to show his needled mouth, his venom sacs oozing a pleasant narcotic. "I've accepted worse," I tell him. US HOWARD WALDROP Here's an ironic, wise, funny, and (as is usual for this author) meticulously researched look at three different lives that might have arisen from one particular fork in the Road of Time, if things had worked out just a bit differently ... and the impact that each of those lives might have had on the world around it. Howard Waldrop is widely considered to be one of the best short-story writers in the business, and his famous story "The Ugly Chickens" won both the Nebula and the World Fantasy Awards in 1981. His work has been gathered in the collections Howard Who?, All About Strange Monsters of the Recent Past, and Night of the Cooters, with more collections in the works. Waldrop is also the author of the novel The Texas-Israeli War: 1999 in collaboration with Jake Saunders, and of two solo novels, Them Bones and A Dozen Tough Jobs. He is at work on a new novel, tentatively entitled The Moon World. His most recent book is a new collection, Going Home Again. His stories have appeared in our First, Third, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Twelfth, and Fifteenth Annual Collections. While he has neither telephone nor computer, he has a Web site at http://www.sff.net/people/waldrop. A longtime Texan, Waldrop now lives in the tiny town of Arlington, Washington, outside Seattle, as close to a trout stream as he can possibly get without actually living in it. PROLOGUE The ladder, though ingeniously made, was flimsy and the rungs were too far apart. He had pushed the dowels into the holes in each of the three sections. It had been made to fit inside the car, parked a mile away off the road to Hopewell. The night was cold and it had not been easy to put the sections of the ladder together with the leather gloves he wore. Construction stuff lay all around. The house wasn't landscaped yet, borders and walks were laid out but not yet rocked in. The house was big, two stories and a gable-windowed third narrow one set in the steeply pitched roof. The outside was stucco. He put the ladder against the upstairs window, the one with the shutter that, though new, was already warped and wouldn't close completely.

He picked up the gunnysack, checked in his pocket for the envelope, and started up. There were two lights on downstairs, the sitting room and the kitchen. The ladder swayed and groaned. He had to lift one leg at a time, more crawl up than climb, then pull the other one after it up to the same rung. When both feet were on one, he could feel the vibration of the strain. He reached the next from the top, pulled the shutter the rest of the way open without a sound. He raised the window, the sack flopping over his face as he used one hand to steady himself and the other to lift. His eyes adjusted to the dim light inside. There was a stack of trunks and suitcases under the window, the sill of which was concrete rather than wood. A crib across the way. Beside the window a fireplace and mantel, some bird toys along the top. A scooter on the floor. Just past the fireplace a big parabolic electric heater and a chair. The room was almost hot. He smelled Mentholatum or Vicks salve. He eased himself over the sill, swung the sack and his feet to the floor. He went to the crib, where the medicine smell was strongest. The kid was safety-pinned under the blankets, its breathing a little rough and croupy. He undid one of the pins, eased the toddler out of the crib. It began to move. "Sh-sh-sh," he said, holding it close and swinging it slightly back and forth. He noticed the kid was in some kind of cut-down larger garment rather than Dr. Denton's or a nightshirt. The child subsided. He pulled a blanket out of the sack, wrapped the kid in it, put both back in the bag, lifted it gently by the center top. He went to the windowsill, laid the bag down, eased himself over. He had to search around for the first rung, turned, put one leg down, then the other. He reached back inside, lifted the child by the sack onto the concrete sill. He felt inside his pocket, took out the envelope, put it on the inside of the sill. Then with both hands, he lifted the sack. ONE: "THE LITTLE EAGLET" He had been born just after Clyde Tombaugh discovered the planet Pluto. He was the most famous child in the world for a year or two, until Shirley Temple came along. He was the son of a famous man and a celebrated mother. Somebody'd tried to kidnap him when he was twenty months old, but they'd caught the guy on the way to his car, and Charles Jr. was back in his crib by 10:00 P.M. and didn't remember a thing about it. But it convinced his father (a very private man) and his mother (from a distinguished family) that they would be hounded all their lives by newspapermen, gossip columnists, and radio reporters if they stayed where they were. They moved out of the house in New Jersey and moved out to Roswell, New Mexico, so his father could be near his friend Dr. Robert H. Goddard, who fooled around with rockets. "The Little Eaglet," as the press had dubbed him, grew up watching six-foot-long pieces of metal rise,

wobble, and explode themselves all over the remote scrub country of the Eden Valley that "Uncle" Robert used as a range. It was a great place to be a kid. His mother and father were often away on flights, surveying airline routes, or his father was off consulting with Boeing or Curtis, or there'd be pictures of him in a zeppelin somewhere. His mother, when she was around, wrote books and was always off in her study, or having another of his brothers and sisters. He had the run of the place. The first time he'd walked over on his own to the worksheds, Uncle Robert had stooped down to his level and said, "Do anything you want here, kid, but don't ever play with matches." They let him have pieces of metal, old tubing, burnt-out frozen-up fuel pumps, and that neat stuff that looks like tortoiseshell. They had to run him out of the place when they closed up at night. He went unwillingly to school in 1936, each day an agony of letters and numbers. Of course he had to poke a few three-foot jerks in the snoot because they made fun of his curly golden hair. He learned a phrase early and used it often: "So's your old man." His own old man, after some vacillation, jumped on the Preparedness bandwagon and was out with Hap Arnold, beefing up the army air corps. You wouldn't have known there'd just been a Depression. Uncle Robert finally got something right. When he was eight, Charles Jr. watched a rocket go up and actually get out of sight before it exploded. He, Uncle Robert, and everybody else ran back inside the small blockhouse while it rained metal for a couple of minutes. Of course his father taught him how to fly, but since he'd been driving the converted mail van and rocket trailer from the shed three miles out to the range since he was six (he'd put blocks on the brakes and accelerator and stood on a box to see out the windshield), he thought flying was a lot like driving a car, only the road was bigger. One time he and his father talked about it. "I like flying too, I guess," said Charles Jr. "But the air's so thick. That's for sissies." "You'll think sissy when you pull three Gs on an inside turn sometime," said the Lone Eagle. He spent most of his time with his aunt and uncle, and by the time he was ten he was working for Uncle Robert after school and full time in the summers, at whatever needed to be done. Uncle Robert was getting older— he'd always looked old with his bald head and mustache, but now his head was wrinkled and the mustache was gray and white like a dollop of cream cheese across his lip. The war had already started in Europe. One day a shady character in a cheap suit brought in some plans and left. The whole crew gathered around. Uncle Robert tapped the blueprints. "That's what the Germans are working on," he said. "They're not very serious yet, but they will be. They're on the right track, but they're

spending most of their time trying to get a good centrifugal pump, and haven't thought about regenerative cooling yet. On the other hand, look at this. Graphite vanes in the exhaust, and I assume if it's ballistic they'll be set beforehand; if it's guidable, they'll have to make room for steering mechanisms and radio controls." He looked at all of them. "The army and air corps have their thumbs up their wazoos right now, so we'll have to do it ourselves on the Smithsonian and Guggenheim money. I figure the Nazis are six months behind us in some things, a couple of years ahead in others." They went to work and they worked hard, especially after the U.S. got in the war when the Japanese bombed the Phillipines. It wasn't easy, but they did it by the middle of 1942. They fired it off. It went 143 miles and punched a thirty-foot hole in the desert even without a warhead. They showed it to the air corps. World War II was over late in 1944, just after Charles Jr. turned 14. *** It was a bright and sunny day in the winter of 1945. He and Uncle Robert were looking at one of the German A-4s that had been lying around everywhere in Europe when the war ended and then shipped to America, along with their scientists. The army had given Goddard five or six to play with. Uncle Robert had been sick the year before, recurrence of the TB of his youth, but had gotten better. Now he seemed to have some of the old spark back. He looked at the pumps, the servo-mechanisms. He looked in the empty warhead section, then he looked at Charles Jr. "How'd you like to take a little ride?" he asked. "Yippee yahoo!" "As many times as you've seen things I built turn into firecrackers?" "You didn't build this one. The Germans did." "At White Sands, they're maybe kinda going to send up mice and monkeys." "Phooey!" said Charles Jr. "Double phooey," said Uncle Robert. *** On March 13, 1946, Charles Jr. went for a little ride. They hadn't told his mother or father, and no one else either, until after the fact.

The front section separated and fired some JATO units as retro rockets, and the surplus cargo parachute opened, and the thing came down sixty-eight miles away, within two miles of where Goddard and the crew were waiting. The trucks drove up. Charles Jr. was sitting in the shade of the parachute canopy. Uncle Robert jumped out of the truck and ran up to him. There was a small cut above his eye. "She rides a little rough," he said, and smiled. *** On July 4th, 1963, The Great Speckled Bird came down on the surface of the Moon, backwards, rockets firing, and settled to the lunar dust. The commander was Col. Chuck Yeager. The pilot was Lt. Col. David Simons, M.D., the navigator was Maj. Joe Kittinger, and the civilian mission specialist was Charles Lindbergh, Jr. After a few hours of yammer and instrument readings that were hunky-dory, Charles Jr. suited up in one of the big bulky space suits the navy had built for them. Yeager checked him over, then said, "You're on, kid." It was being carried live by all the radios in the world; they'd have to wait till they got back to see it, as both Early Bird and Echo III satellites weren't cooperating. The big ladder came out from the ship and Charles Jr. backed down it, unable to see well behind him because of the size of the oxygen equipment on the suit. He paused just as he got to the bottom, looked up at Kittinger who was filming him with an Eymo camera (besides the official one on the side of the airlock), and stretched his foot out, inches above the dust. He swung one foot out in a small circle, almost touching, then the other. He said, "Here's one for Mom, and one for Pop, and one for Uncle Robert and"— he jumped onto the ground with both feet—"one for the good old USA." TWO: "CALL ME CHUCKY" He could say he'd been around since Pluto was a pup. Disney made the first cartoon with Mickey's mutt a few months after he was born. When he was twenty months old he was kidnapped. It was the most sensational story of the decade.

After much police activity and several copycat ransom notes, his father, the most famous man in the world, and, after Babe Ruth, in America, paid the right people and went in a coast guard plane to find his son in the boat— as the kidnapper's message said, "boad"— Nelly between Horseneck Beach and Gay Head near Elizabeth Island. Charles Jr. was sleeping like a log in a built-in bureau drawer belowdecks on the stolen and deserted boat. The kidnappers were never found and the ransom money, much of it in marked gold certificates, which became illegal tender a couple of years later, never showed up. Colonel H. N. Schwarzkopf of the New Jersey State Police had put a twenty-four-hour guard around the Lindbergh house in Hopewell and up at the Morrow house just after the kidnapping. His father hired his own bodyguards and dismissed the state troopers once Charles Jr. was recovered. But they moved from New Jersey soon anyway. Famous father, famous mother, most famous child in America. Of course he ended up in Hollywood. *** Later in interviews, Charles Jr.—"Call me Chucky"— said, "Yeah, yeah, child of the Depression. We had to cut down to two cooks. And don't ask me how somebody with such a publicity-shy father and mother ended up doing one, count'em, one Our Gang short. I think they felt sorry for me— guys with big guns walking around wherever we were; people watching me like a hawk day and night." "Warhol used to run that damn clip at the Factory all the time. There I am, three years old, sitting in a beer-barrel airplane, replica of the Spirit, with an aviator's cap. There I am, me and the new kid Spanky— whatever happened to him, huh?— racing all these other kids down that damn long hill in L.A.; soapbox racers, fire engines, tanks, and me and Spanky McFarland win 'cause all the other kids have a wooden demo-derby." "They tell me Roach creamed his shorts; wanted to sign me, team with Spanky; already had a name picked out, Sankandank, you know, Spank and Sankandank, anyway, lifetime contract; Louis B. Mayer would honor it once I got too old for the Gang stuff." "Yeah, I coulda had it all. Been as big as Buckwheat or Alfalfa. Coulda stayed on, beat up on Butch and Woim." "What happened. Dad said no way, José." *** His father had visited Italy and Germany several times, and they had lived in England for a while, only to find British newspapermen just like the ones in America, so they moved back. His father was convinced that since it wasn't ready and couldn't afford it, the U.S. should stay neutral in any coming conflict in Europe or Asia. He'd become a major spokesman for America First.

One day at school, Chucky came out to find one of his best friends beating the snot out of another. He pulled them apart while they were swinging in blind rage at each other, noses bloodied, eyes shut. "Geez, guys!" he said. One pointed to the other. "He said your father was a Jew-hater. That made me mad. I said no, he wasn't, he was just dumb as a post. That made him mad." Chucky, age eleven, went home. His father was packing for a trip to Des Moines where he was going to make a terrifically ill-timed speech about staying out of the European war which had been going on for a year and a half already. "Dad," said Chucky to his father, who looked just like him only bigger, and was putting shirts in a leather bag. "Dad, somebody has to kick some Hitler butt." He was sent to his room without his supper. *** "Yeah, yeah," said Chucky in another interview in 1989, "that was the first time any kid of his expressed an opinion that wasn't his. It started me on that downward spiral that led me to where I am today. For which, thanks ..." After the war was over and things got back to normal, Chucky went off to college in 1948. And fell in with evil companions. Some guys who endlessly drove back and forth across the country because they couldn't stand wherever they were. Poets, artists, weirdos, and Old Lefties, white folksingers who spent all their money on bus trips to Alabama to learn exactly what it was Cornbread Joe hollered on that record across the fields when he wanted someone to bring the water jug or oats for the mule. There were a zillion guys loose in New York City on the GI bill, finding out what life was all about. Chucky: "Say what you will. The guys who shot heroin are all still alive; the boozers have been dead these thirty years." Then he started to make things. Birdhouses made out of old airplane parts. Small ones at first, made from old propeller hubs and radio aerials, exhaust stacks, parts of instrument panels. Then they got larger and more complicated. He had a few small gallery shows, then a couple at museums. He dropped out of college his sophomore year, rented a studio and went to work. One day Calder came by, took a look around, and whistled. Rauschenberg and all those guys dropped in; Mailer, smarting from Barbary Shore, came in and smoked some tea and talked about Chucky's pop, whom he'd met in the Pacific, and said he was going to start a Village newspaper sometime. His first real show was called "Birdhouses for the Stratosphere" and it all went fine from then on. He went on to use parts from jets. His Birdhouse for the Rukh used most of a Super Constellation he'd gotten cheap from the NATSB. They had to build an extra plaza in front of the rededicated O'Hare before he could install it. Even with that going on, he continued to make the smaller houses all through the fifties and sixties and

have shows in little galleries; people actually bought them and used them for birdhouses. His wren series— made from an old Curtiss Wren— was the best and most popular. At one of these small-show openings in the early sixties, Chucky was a little high from reefer and a little tight from wine and a little up from some innocuous-looking red tablets someone had given him. He was 32 and good at what he did, and knew he'd be doing it the rest of his life. An old man was looking at some of the things ("Houses for the Bluebird of Sadness," the show was) and waited until the people who'd been around Chucky went over for the free cheese and beer. The old man caught his eye. "You did these?" "Yep." "I have something to tell you," said the old man. "But I can't tell you until you promise it goes no further." "Oh, this is serious? Wait a sec." Chucky quit smiling and set his face in a calm mask with a wipe of his hand. "There," he said. "Try me." "Between you and me?" "My word as a Video Ranger," said Chucky. The old man eyed him, then sagged his shoulders. "I kidnapped you once." "Sonofabitch!" said Chucky. "Not you. The situation. Why'd you ever do that?" "I went messhuganeh," said the old man. "It was the Depression. I was desperate. I borrowed a stranger's boat. I kipped you from the crib, sent the notes." "Well, they never caught you." "It was very fucked over, from beginning to end. I couldn't believe it, that I was getting away with it, I was so excited. And I lost it, all $50,000 of it, between the time I put you in the boat and the time they came to get you. I took it from the satchel your father brought it to the graveyard in and put it in a big tin box. I had it with me when I put you on the boat. I was so excited, I dropped it. I watched my life getting smaller and smaller and further away. If only I'd put it in a wooden box ..." "Could I give you a few bucks?" asked Chucky. "I didn't come here, Mr. Lindbergh, Jr., to ask for money. I came here to ask forgiveness." Chucky laughed and reached out and grabbed him by the shoulders, causing him to wince. "Forgive? Mister, that was probably the best thing that ever happened to me. Thank you!"

"You mean that? All these years, nobody knew but me, and I was so sorry that I'd done it. I've lived a clean life since...." "Gaffer," said Chucky. "Go with my blessing. I mean that. Thanks for telling me." "Good-bye, then." "Good-bye." He watched the old man leave. "Whowazzat?" asked a friend. "It looked intense." "A stranger," said Chucky, smiling. "He wanted to put the touch on my old man." *** When his father died in the 1970s, Chucky called up a bunch of old engineers and mechanics and tool-and-die men. He had them make an exact replica of the Ryan Spirit of St. Louis. Then he took it apart, piece by piece, and built the Birdhouse for Pop. It's outside the Air and Space Museum. THREE: "CRAZY CHARLIE" After seventeen years in the Plutonian depths of being a famous man's son, he took off. In 1953, just at the end of the Korean War, a guy showed up in Concrete, Washington. He walked with a slight gimp. He drove a secondhand two-door purple Kaiser. He rented a place on the edge of town for $8.40 a month. Once a week or so he'd drive out of town; one of the locals saw him over at the Veterans' Hospital in Mt. Vernon. Otherwise he walked everywhere in the town of Concrete, shopped at the local grocery store. Slowly it got out that his name was Charles. Mostly what he did was fish the Skagit River, 365 days a year if he could, less if it was muddied up, though the flow was now controlled through Diablo and Gorge Dams. Sometimes the Sauk and Cascade were muddied up and put the lower river out for fishing for four or five days at a time. He used a Gladding Ike Walton model 8 fiberglass fly rod and a Pfleuger 1498 reel, and he caught more fly-fishing than all the other people around there caught with bait or casting reels or the new spinning reels. People over on the Skykomish and Stillaguamish fly-fished, but not many yet on the Skagit. One day right downtown, in a pouring rain, fifteen or twenty people stood on the bridge to watch him. There was already both ends of about an eight-pounder sticking out of the back pouch of his homemade fishing jacket, and they watched for twenty-two minutes by the watch, as he played and landed what was by the best estimate a steelhead that would go twenty-five pounds. He reached down with a pair of pliers and jerked the Brad's Brat out of the fish's lip and watched it swim back out to the deeper water against the far bank.

"What the hell?" yelled someone from the bridge. "They won't be around forever, you know?" said Charles. "Then why the hell did you catch it if you were going to let it go?" "Because I can't help myself," said Charles, and began casting again. From then on he was Crazy Charlie. *** In 1957, over in Sedro-Wooley, he met a girl at the Dairy Delight. She moved in with him in a slightly larger shack on the edge of Concrete that cost $12.00 a month. They ate trout and salmon; she canned salmonberries and blackberries; they smoked steelhead and came out of the woods with mushrooms and roots and nuts and skunk cabbage; they drove in the purple Kaiser. In 1958 they had twin boys, whom people learned to call Key and Matt. They assumed they were family names for something like Keyes or Keynard and Matthew or even Mattias. If you go to the Skagit County Courthouse and look up their birth certificates, you'll find their names are Quemoy and Matsu. It was 1958 after all. The one peculiarity other fishermen and the people in town noticed was that wherever he was, whatever he was doing, even playing a fish, if a plane flew over he would watch it until it disappeared. They assumed it had something to do with the Korean War. *** One day one of the town blowhards came into the cafe shaking his head. Everybody was ready for a story. "Goddamnedest thing. Give me that Seattle paper," he said. He looked through it quickly. "Here, damn, Ed, you look." "What'm I lookin' for?" "Well look with your eyes and just lissen. I was up in Marblemount at the Rocky Ford Cafe. Over in the corner was Crazy Charlie and that girl of his— the two boys being most likely in school this time of day. And you know who was in the booth with them, talkin' to them? Huh?" "Dwight David Eisenhower," said someone. They all laughed. "Charles Lindbergh. The Lone Eagle."

"Shit," said someone. "What would he be doin' talkin to Crazy Charlie?" "You got me. He's older now, Lindbergh, but I knew it was him from when he used to come to the plant during the war. As big as life. Sure as shootin'." They all knew the blowhard had retired from Boeing with a disability a few years before. "He used to be a practical joker, give old man Boeing a hotfoot soon as look at him," he continued. "Always cutting up." "Well, what was they doin'?" "Eating hamburgers, shakes, and fries." "I didn't think Charlie and his girl ate that kind of stuff. The kids neither." "I said the kids wasn't there. And they was sure as hell eatin' that way today." "Did they see you?" "Hell, no. I was so astounded it was Lindbergh I just sat down in that far booth, the one halfway in the kitchen. Couldn't hear 'em neither, place was crowded. Had a roast beef sandwich." "We don't care what you had for lunch. What'd Lindbergh do?" "Talked. Ate. Went outside. By the time I was through they was gone." "Nothing about Lindbergh in the papers," said Ed. "Can you beat that? Guy like that in town, nobody thinks it's a big deal." "Well, it was more than thirty years ago," said the blowhard. "Still, you'd think somebody would mention it." "Maybe it was personal," said someone. "Yeah, right. The Lone Eagle and Crazy Charlie and his girl." They all laughed. *** Charlie died in 1985. His common-law wife Estelle died in 1989. Quemoy and Matsu own motion picture production in Seattle like the Krays owned London in the sixties. Neither fishes. EPILOGUE: He reached in his pocket, took out the envelope, put it on the inside of the sill.

Then, with both hands he lifted the sack. The rung broke with a sharp snap and his foot hit the next one. There was a sudden instant of chill blind panic. The sack had thudded onto the concrete sill. He eased his other foot down the outside of the ladder to the rung he'd fallen to. He made it the rest of the way down, filled with adrenaline, cradled the bundle in his arms, and made off for the woods and his car. Halfway through the trees, he realized the kid hadn't moved. When he got within sight of the car, he put the sack down, lifted the blanket and child out. The kid was limp as a bunch of leather. One side of the head was misshapen. He felt around for a heartbeat. He went further back into the woods from the road, laid the kid down, kicked some leaves over him, and took the blanket and sack to his car and sped away toward Manhattan. *** The biggest manhunt in history was on. There were shady intermediaries, ransom was paid. There was no Boad Nelly, no child. Two truck drivers, one black, one white, on their way into Hopewell two months later, stopped their truck and went into the woods to take a pee. They saw what was left of the kid on the ground. He had been gnawed by animals. They ran for the cops. Three years later, Bruno Richard Hauptmann, on trial for his life for essentially passing hot gold certificates, was shown the ladder used in the kidnapping. "I did not make that," he said. "I am a carpenter." The Days of Solomon Gursky IAN McDONALD Here's a fast-paced, gorgeously colored, richly detailed, and wildly inventive story that sweeps us along on a journey of almost unimaginable scope and grandeur, tracing one man's journey through life and into death and then out the other side. McDonald takes us from a troubled near-future to the distant stars and on to the very end of the universe and the end of time itself— and beyond! British author Ian McDonald is an ambitious and daring writer with a wide range and an impressive amount of talent. His first story was published in 1982, and since then he has appeared with some frequency in Interzone, Asimov's Science Fiction, New Worlds, Zenith, Other Edens, Amazing, and elsewhere. He was nominated for the John W. Campbell Award in 1985, and in 1989 he won the Locus Best First Novel Award for Desolation Road. He won the Philip K. Dick Award

in 1992 for his novel King of Morning, Queen of Day. His other books include the novels Out on Blue Six; Hearts, Hands and Voices; Terminal Café; Sacrifice of Fools; and the acclaimed Evolution's Shore, and two collections of his short fiction, Empire Dreams and Speaking in Tongues. His most recent book is a new novel, Kirinya. His stories have appeared in our Eighth, Ninth, Tenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Annual Collections. Born in Manchester, England, in 1960, McDonald has spent most of his life in Northern Ireland, and now lives and works in Belfast. MONDAY Sol stripped the gear on the trail over Blood of Christ Mountain. Clickshifted down to sixth for the steep push up to the ridge, and there was no sixth. No fifth, no fourth; nothing, down to zero. Elena was already up on the divide, laughing at him pushing and sweating up through the pines, muscles twisted and knotted like the trunks of the primeval bristlecones, tubes and tendons straining like bridge cable. Then she saw the gear train sheared through and spinning free. They'd given the bikes a good hard kicking down in the desert mountains south of Nogales. Two thousand apiece, but the salesperson had sworn on the virginity of all his unmarried sisters that these MTBs would go anywhere, do anything you wanted. Climb straight up El Capitan, if that was what you needed of them. Now they were five days on the trail— three from the nearest Dirt Lobo dealership, so Elena's palmtop told her— and a gear train had broken clean in half. Ten more days, four hundred more miles, fifty more mountains for Solomon Gursky, in high gear. "Should have been prepared for this, engineer," Elena said. "Two thousand a bike, you shouldn't need to," Solomon Gursky replied. It was early afternoon up on Blood of Christ Mountain, high and hot and resinous with the scent of the old, old pines. There was haze down in the valley they had come from, and in the one they were riding to. "And you know I'm not that kind of engineer. My gears are a lot smaller. And they don't break." Elena knew what kind of engineer he was, as he knew what kind of doctor she was. But the thing was new between them and at the stage where research colleagues who surprise themselves by becoming lovers like to pretend that they are mysteries to each other. Elena's palmtop map showed a settlement five miles down the valley. It was called Redención. It might be the kind of place they could get welding done quick and good for norte dollars. "Be happy, it's downhill," Elena said as she swung her electric-blue padded ass onto the saddle and plunged down off the ridge. One second later, Sol Gursky in his shirt and shorts and shoes and shades and helmet came tearing after her through the scrub sage. The thing between them was still at the stage where desire can flare at a flash of electric-blue Lycra-covered ass. Redención it was, of the kind you get in the border mountains; of gas and food and trailers to hire by the night, or the week, or, if you have absolutely nowhere else to go, the lifetime; of truck stops and recreational Jacuzzis at night under the border country stars. No welding. Something better. The many-branched saguaro of a solar tree was the first thing of Redención the travelers saw lift out of the heat haze as they came in along the old, cracked, empty highway.

The factory was in an ugly block annex behind the gas and food. A truck driver followed Sol and Elena round the back, entranced by these fantastic macaw-bright creatures who kept their eyes hidden behind wrap-around shades. He was chewing a sandwich. He had nothing better to do in Redención on a hot Monday afternoon. Jorge, the proprietor, looked too young and ambitious to be pushing gas, food, trailers, and molecules in Redención on any afternoon. He was thirty-wise, dark, serious. There was something tight-wound about him. Elena said in English that he had the look of a man of sorrows. But he took the broken gear train seriously, and helped Sol remove it from the back wheel. He looked at the smooth, clean shear plane with admiration. "This I can do," he declared. "Take an hour, hour and a half. Meantime, maybe you'd like to take a Jacuzzi?" This, wrinkling his nose, downwind of two MTBers come over Blood of Christ Mountain in the heat of the day. The truck driver grinned. Elena scowled. "Very private," insisted Jorge the nanofacturer. "Something to drink?" Elena suggested. "Sure. Coke, Sprite, beer, agua minerale. In the shop." Elena went the long way around the trucker to investigate the cooler. Sol followed Jorge into the factory and watched him set the gears in the scanner. "Actually, this is my job," Sol said to make conversation as the lasers mapped the geometry of the ziggurat of cogs in three dimensions. He spoke Spanish. Everyone did. It was the universal language up in the norte now, as well as down el sur. "You have a factory?" "I'm an engineer. I build these things. Not the scanners, I mean; the tectors. I design them. A nano-engineer." The monitor told Jorge the mapping was complete. "For the Tesler corporada," Sol added as Jorge called up the processor system. "How do you want it?" "I'd like to know it's not going to do this to me again. Can you build it in diamond?" "All just atoms, friend." Sol studied the processor chamber. It pleased him that they looked like whisky stills; round-bellied, high-necked, rising through the roof into the spreading fingers of the solar tree. Strong spirits in that still, spirits of the vacuum between galaxies, the cold of absolute zero, and the spirits of the tectors moving through cold and emptiness, shuffling atoms. He regretted that the physics did not allow viewing windows in the nanofacturers. Look down through a pane of pure and perfect diamond at the act of creation. Maybe creation was best left unseen, a mystery. All just atoms, friend. Yes, but it was what you did with those atoms, where you made them go. The weird troilisms and menages you forced them into. He envisioned the minuscule machines, smaller than viruses, clever knots of atoms, scavenging carbon through the nanofacturer's roots deep in the earth of Redención, passing it up the buckytube conduits to the processor chamber, weaving it into diamond of his own shaping.

Alchemy. Diamond gears. Sol Gursky shivered in his light biking clothes, touched by the intellectual chill of the nanoprocessor. "This is one of mine," he called to Jorge. "I designed the tectors." "I wouldn't know." Jorge fetched beers from a crate on the factory floor, opened them in the door. "I bought the whole place from a guy two years back. Went up north, to the Tres Valles. You from there?" The beer was cold. In the deeper, darker cold of the reactor chamber, the nanomachines swarmed. Sol Gursky held his arms out: Jesus of the MTB wear. "Isn't everyone?" "Not yet. So, who was it you said you work for? Nanosis? Ewart-OzWest?" "Tesler Corp. I head up a research group into biological analogs." "Never heard of them." You will, was what Solomon Gursky would have said, but for the scream. Elena's scream. Not, he thought as he ran, that he had heard Elena's scream— the thing was not supposed to be at that stage— but he knew it could not belong to anyone else. She was standing in the open back door of the gas and food, pale and shaky in the high bright light. "I'm sorry," she said. "I just wanted to get some water. There wasn't any in the cooler, and I didn't want Coke. I just wanted to get some water from the faucet." He was aware that Jorge was behind him as he went into the kitchen. Man mess: twenty coffee mugs, doughnut boxes, beer cans, and milk cartons. Spoons, knives, forks. He did that too, and Elena told him off for having to take a clean one every time. Then he saw the figures through the open door. Somewhere, Jorge was saying, "Please, this is my home." There were three of them; a good-looking, hard-worked woman, and two little girls, one newly school-age, the other not long on her feet. They sat in chairs, hands on thighs. They looked straight ahead. It was only because they did not blink, that their bodies did not rock gently to the tick of pulse and breath, that Sol could understand.

The color was perfect. He touched the woman's cheek, the coil of dark hair that fell across it. Warm soft. Like a woman's should feel. Texture like skin. His fingertips left a line in dust. They sat unblinking, unmoving, the woman and her children, enshrined in their own memorabilia. Photographs, toys, little pieces of jewelry, loved books and ornaments, combs, mirrors. Pictures and clothes. Things that make up a life. Sol walked among the figures and their things, knowing that he trespassed in sacred space, but irresistibly drawn by the simulacra. "They were yours?" Elena was saying somewhere. And Jorge was nodding, and his mouth was working but no words were manufactured. "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry." "They said it was a blow-out." Jorge finally said. "You know, those tires they say repair themselves, so they never blow out? They blew out. They went right over the barrier, upside down. That's what the truck driver said. Right over, and he could see them all, upside down. Like they were frozen in time, you understand?" He paused. "I went kind of dark for a long time after that; a lot crazy, you know? When I could see things again, I bought this with the insurance and the compensation. Like I say, it's all just atoms, friend. Putting them in the right order. Making them go where you want, do what you want." "I'm sorry we intruded," Elena said, but Solomon Gursky was standing there among the reconstructed dead and the look on his face was that of a man seeing something far beyond what is in front of him, all the way to God. "Folk out here are accommodating." But Jorge's smile was a tear of sutures. "You can't live in a place like this if you weren't a little crazy or lost." "She was very beautiful," Elena said. "She is." Dust sparkled in the float of afternoon light through the window. "Sol?" "Yeah. Coming." The diamond gears were out of the tank in twenty-five minutes. Jorge helped Sol fit them to the two thousand norte dollar bike. Then Sol rode around the factory and the gas-food-trailer house where the icons of the dead sat unblinking under the slow fall of dust. He clicked the gears up and clicked them down. One two three four five six. Six five four three two one. Then he paid Jorge fifty norte, which was all he asked for his diamond. Elena waved to him as they rode down the highway out of Redención. They made love by firelight on the top of Blessed Virgin Mountain, on the pine needles, under the stars. That was the stage they were at: ravenous, unselfconscious, discovering. The old deaths, down the valley behind them, gave them urgency. Afterward, he was quiet and withdrawn, and when she asked what he was thinking about, he said, "The resurrection of the dead." "But they weren't resurrected," she said, knowing instantly what he meant, for it haunted her too, up on their starry mountain. "They were just representations, like a painting or a photograph. Sculpted

memories. Simulations." "But they were real for him." Sol rolled onto his back to gaze at the warm stars of the border. "He told me he talked to them. If his nanofactory could have made them move and breathe and talk back, he'd have done it, and who could have said that they weren't real?" He felt Elena shiver against his flesh. "What is it?" "Just thinking about those faces, and imagining them in the reactor chamber, in the cold and the emptiness, with the tectors crawling over them." "Yeah." Neither spoke for a time long enough to see the stars move. Then Solomon Gursky felt the heat stir in him again and he turned to Elena and felt the warmth of her meat, hungry for his second little death. TUESDAY Jesus was getting fractious in the plastic cat carrier; heaving from side to side, shaking the grille. Sol Gursky set the carrier on the landing mesh and searched the ochre smog haze for the incoming liftercraft. Photochromic molecules bonded to his irises polarized: another hot, bright, poisonous day in the TVMA. Jesus was shrieking now. "Shut the hell up," Sol Gursky hissed. He kicked the cat carrier. Jesus gibbered and thrust her arms through the grille, grasping at freedom. "Hey, it's only a monkey," Elena said. But that was the thing. Monkeys, by being monkeys, annoyed him. Frequently enraged him. Little homunculus things masquerading as human. Clever little fingers, wise little eyes, expressive little faces. Nothing but dumb animal behind that face, running those so-human fingers. He knew his anger at monkeys was irrational. But he'd still enjoyed killing Jesus, taped wide open on the pure white slab. Swab, shave, slip the needle. Of course, she had not been Jesus then. Just Rhesus; nameless, a tool made out of meat. Experiment 625G. It was probably the smog that was making her scream. Should have got her one of those goggle things for walking poodles. But she would have just torn it off with her clever little human fingers. Clever enough to be dumb, monkey-thing. Elena was kneeling down, playing baby-fingers with the clutching fists thrust through the bars.

"It'll bite you." His hand still throbbed. Dripping, shivering, and spastic from the tank, Jesus had still possessed enough motor control to turn her head and lay his thumb open to the bone. Vampire monkey: the undead appetite for blood. Bastard thing. He would have enjoyed killing it again, if it were still killable. All three on the landing grid looked up at the sound of lifter engines detaching themselves from the aural bedrock of two million cars. The ship was coming in from the south, across the valley from the big site down on Hoover where the new corporada headquarters was growing itself out of the fault line. It came low and fast, nose down, ass up, like a big bug that thrives on the taste of hydrocarbons in its spiracles. The backwash from its jets flustered the palm trees as it configured into vertical mode and came down on the research facility pad. Sol Gursky and Elena Asado shielded their sunscreened eyes from flying grit and leafstorm. Jesus ran from end to end of her plastic cage, gibbering with fear. "Doctor Gursky." Sol did not think he had seen this corporadisto before, but it was hard to be certain; Adam Tesler liked his personal assistants to look as if he had nanofactured them. "I can't begin to tell you how excited Mr. Tesler is about this." "You should be there with me," Sol said to Elena. "It was your idea." Then, to the suit, "Dr. Asado should be with me." Elena swiped at her jet-blown hair. "I shouldn't, Sol. It was your baby. Your gestation, your birth. Anyway, you know how I hate dealing with suits." This for the smiling PA, but he was already guiding Sol to the open hatch. Sol strapped in and the ship lurched as the engines screamed up into lift. He saw Elena wave and duck back toward the facility. He clutched the cat carrier hard as his gut kicked when the lifter slid into horizontal flight. Within, the dead monkey burbled to herself in exquisite terror. "What happened to your thumb?" the corporadisto asked. When he'd cracked the tank and lifted Jesus the Rhesus out of the waters of rebirth, the monkey had seemed more pissed off at being sopping wet than at having been dead. There had been a pure, perfect moment of silence, then the simultaneous oath and gout of blood, and the Lazarus team had exploded into whooping exultation. The monkey had skittered across the floor, alarmed by the hooting and cheering, hunting for height and hiding. Elena had caught it spastically trying—and failing—to hurl itself up the side of a desk. She'd swaddled Jesus up in thermal sheeting and put the spasming thing in the observation incubator. Within the hour, Jesus had regained full motor control and was chewing at the corners of her plastic pen, scratching imaginary fleas and masturbating ferociously. While delivery companies dropped off pizza stacks and cases of cheap Mexican champagne, someone remembered to call Adam Tesler. The dead monkey was not a good flier. She set up a wailing keen that had even the pilot complaining. "Stop that," Sol Gursky snapped. It would not do anything for him, though, and rocked on its bare ass and wailed all the louder.

"What way is that to talk to a piece of history?" the PA said. He grinned in through the grille, waggled fingers, clicked tongue. "Hey there, little fellow. Whatcha call him?" "Little bitch, actually. We call her Jesus; also known as Bride of Frankenstein." Bite him, Solomon Gursky thought as ten thousand mirrored swimming pools slipped beneath the belly of the Tesler Corporada lifter. Frankenstein's creations were dead. That was the thing. That was the revelation. It was the Age of Everything, but the power to make anything into anything else was not enough, because there was one thing the tectors of Nanosis and Aristide-Tlaxcalpo and the other founders of the nanotech revolution could not manipulate into anything else, and that was death. A comment by a pioneer nanotechnologist captured the optimism and frustration of the Age of Everything: Watson's Postulate. Never mind turning trash into oil or asteroids into heaps of Volkswagens, or hanging exact copies of Van Goghs in your living room; the first thing we get with nanotechnology is immortality. Five billion Rim dollars in research disproved it. What tectors touched, they transformed; what they transformed, they killed. The Gursky-Asado team had beaten its rivals to the viral replicators, that infiltrated living cells and converted them into a different, tector-based matrix, and from their DNA spored a million copies. It had shaped an algorithm from the deadly accuracy of carcinomas. It had run tests under glass and in tanks. It had christened that other nameless Rhesus Frankenstein and injected the tectors. And Sol and Elena had watched the tiny machines slowly transform the monkey's body into something not even gangrene could imagine. Elena wanted to put it out of its misery, but they could not open the tank for fear of contamination. After a week, it ended. The monster fell apart. That was the thing. And then Asado and Gursky remembered a hot afternoon when Sol got a set of diamond gears built in a place called Redención. If death was a complex thing, an accumulation of microdeath upon minideath upon little death upon middling death, life might obey the same power law. Escalating anti-entropy. Pyramid-plan life. Gursky's Corollary to Watson's Postulate: The first thing we get with nanotechnology is the resurrection of the dead. The Dark Tower rose out of the amber haze. Sol and Elena's private joke had escaped and replicated itself; everyone in R&D now called the thing Adam Tesler was building down in the valley Barad Dur, in Mordor, where the smogs lie. And Adam Tesler, its unresting, all-seeing Eye. There were over fifty levels of it now, but it showed no signs of stopping. As each section solidified and became dormant, another division of Adam Tesler's corporate edifice was slotted in. The architects were unable to say where it would stop. A kilometer, a kilometer and a half; maybe then the architectors would stabilize and die. Sol loathed its glossy black excrescences and crenellations, a miscegeny of the geological and the cancerous. Gaudi sculpting in shit. The lifter came in high over the construction, locked into the navigation grid and banked. Sol looked down into its open black maw.

All just atoms, the guy who owned the factory had said. Sol could not remember his name now. The living and the dead have the same atoms. They'd started small: paramecia, amoebae. Things hardly alive. Invertebrates. Reanimated cockroaches, hurtling on their thin legs around the observation tank. Biological machine, nanotech machine, still a machine. Survival machine. Except now you couldn't stomp the bastards. They came back. What good is resurrection, if you are just going to die again? The cockroaches came back, and they kept coming back. He had been the cautious one this time, working carefully up the evolutionary chain. Elena was the one who wanted to go right for it. Do the monkey. Do the monkey and you do the man. He had watched the tectors swarm over it, strip skin from flesh, flesh from bone, dissolve bones. He had watched the nanomachines put it all back together into a monkey. It lay in the liquid intact, but, its signs said, dead. Then the line kicked, and kicked again, and another twitched in harmony, and a third came in, and then they were all playing together on the vital signs monitor, and that which was dead was risen. The lifter was into descent, lowering itself toward the exact center of the white cross on the landing grid fastened to the side of the growing tower. Touchdown. The craft rocked on its bug legs. Seat-belt sign off, steps down. "You behave yourself," Solomon Gursky told Jesus. The All-Seeing Eye was waiting for him by the upshaft. His Dark Minions were with him. "Sol." The handshake was warm and strong, but Sol Gursky had never trusted Adam Tesler in all the years he had known him; as nanoengineering student or as head of the most dynamic nanotech corporada in the Pacific Rim Co-Prosperity Sphere. "So this is it?" Adam Tesler squatted down and choo-choo-chooked the monkey. "She bites." "I see." Jesus grabbed his thumb in her tiny pink homunculus hand. "So, you are the man who has beaten the final enemy." "Not beaten it. Found something on the far side of it. It's resurrection, not immortality." Adam Tesler opened the cage. Jesus hopped up his arm to perch on the shoulder of his Scarpacchi suit. Tesler tickled the fur of her belly. "And humans?" "Point one percent divergence between her DNA and yours."

"Ah." Adam Tesler closed his eyes. "This makes it all the harder." Fear pulsed through Solomon Gursky like a sickness. "Leave us, please," Adam Tesler said to his assistants. "I'll join you in a moment." Unspeaking, they filed to the lifter. "Adam?" "Sol. Why did you do it?" "What are you talking about, Adam?" "You know, Sol." For an instant, Sol Gursky died on the landing grid fused to the fifty-third level of the Tesler corporada tower. Then he returned to life, and knew with cool and beautiful clarity that he could say it all, that he must say it all, because he was dead now and nothing could touch him. "It's too much for one person. Adam. This isn't building cars or growing houses or nanofacturing custom pharmaceuticals. This is the resurrection of the dead. This is every human being from now to the end of the universe. You can't be allowed to own that. Not even God should have a monopoly on eternal life." Adam Tesler sighed. His irises were photochromed dark, their expression unreadable. "So. How long is it?" "Thirteen years." "I thought I knew you, Sol." "I thought I knew you." The air was clear and fresh and pure, here on this high perch. "How did you find out?" Adam Tesler stroked the monkey's head. It tried to push his fingers away, baring sharp teeth. "You can come here now, Marisa." The tall, muscular woman who walked from the upshaft across the landing grid was no stranger to Sol. He knew her from the Yucatán resort mastaba and the Alaskan ski-lodge and the gambling complex grown out of the nanoengineered reef in the South China Sea. From clandestine conversations through secure channels and discreet meetings, he knew that her voice would be soft and low and tinted Australian. "You dressed better when you worked for Aristide Tlaxcalpo," Sol said. The woman was dressed in street leathers. She smiled. She had smiled better then as well. "Why them?" Adam Tesler said. "Of all the ones to betray me to, those clowns!"

"That's why," said Solomon Gursky. "Elena had nothing to do with this, you know." "I know that. She's safe. For the moment." Sol Gursky knew then what must happen, and he shivered with the sudden, urgent need to destroy before he was destroyed. He pushed down the shake of rage by force of will as he held his hand out and clicked his fingers to the monkey. Jesus frowned and frisked off Tesler's shoulder to Sol's hand. In an instant, he had stretched, twisted, and snapped its neck. He flung the twitching thing away from him. It fell to the red mesh. "I can understand that," Adam Tesler said. "But it will come back again, and again, and again." He turned on the bottom step of the lifter. "Have you any idea how disappointed I am, Sol?" "I really don't give a shit!" Solomon Gursky shouted but his words were swallowed by the roar of engine power-up. The lifter hovered and swooped down over the great grid of the city toward the northern hills. Sol Gursky and Marisa were alone on the platform. "Do it!" he shouted. Those muscles he had so admired, he realized, were augments; her fingers took a fistful of his neck and lifted him off the ground. Strangling, he kicked at air, snatched at breath. One-armed, she carried him to the edge. "Do it," he tried to say, but her fingers choked all words in his throat. She held him out over the drop, smiling. He shat himself, and realized as it poured out of him that it was ecstasy, that it always had been, and the reason that adults forbade it was precisely because it was such a primal joy. Through blood haze, he saw the tiny knotted body of Jesus inching toward him on pink man-fingers, its neck twisted over its back, eyes staring unshielded into the sun. Then the woman fingers at last released their grip, and he whispered "thank you" as he dropped toward the hard white death-light of Hoover Boulevard. WEDNESDAY The seguridados were on the boulevards tonight, hunting the trespassing dead. The meat were monsters, overmoneyed, understimulated, cerristo males and females who deeply enjoyed playing angels of Big Death in a world where any other kind of death was temporary. The meat were horrors, but their machines were beautiful. Mechadors: robot mantises with beaks of vanadium steel and two rapid fire MIST 27s throwing fifty self-targeting drones per second, each separating into a hail of sub-munitions half a second before impact. Fifteen wide-spectrum senses analyzed the world; the machines maneuvered on tightly focused impeller fields. And absolutely no thought or mercy. Big beautiful death. The window in the house in the hills was big and wide and the man stood in the middle of it. He was watching the mechadors hunt. There were four of them, two pairs working each side of the avenue. He saw the one with Necroslayer painted on its tectoplastic skin bound over the shrubbery from the Sifuentes place in a single pulse of focused electrogravitic force. It moved over the lawn, beaked head sensing. It paused, scanned the window. The man met its five cluster eyes for an instant. It moved on. Its

impeller drive left eddy patterns on the shaved turf. The man watched until the mechadors passed out of sight, and the seguridados in their over-emphatic battle-armor came up the avenue, covering imagined threats with their hideously powerful weapons. "It's every night now," he said. "They're getting scared." In an instant, the woman was in the big, wood-floored room where the man stood. She was dressed in a virtuality bodyglove; snapped tendrils retracting into the suit's node points indicated the abruptness with which she had pulled out of the web. She was dark and very angry. Scared angry. "Jesus Joseph Mary, how many times do I have to tell you? Keep away from that window! They catch you, you're dead. Again. Permanently." Solomon Gursky shrugged. In the few weeks that he had lived in her house, the woman had come to hate that shrug. It was a shrug that only the dead can make. She hated it because it brought the chill of the abyss into her big, warm, beautiful house in the hills. "It changes things," the dead man said. Elena Asado pulled smart-leather pants and a mesh top over the bodyglove. Since turning traitor, she'd lived in the thing. Twelve hours a day hooked into the web by eye and ear and nose and soul, fighting the man who had killed her lover. As well fight God, Solomon Gursky thought in the long, empty hours in the airy, light-filled rooms. He is lord of life and death. Elena only removed the bodyglove to wash and excrete and, in those early, blue-lit mornings that only this city could do, when she made chilly love on the big white bed. Time and anger had made her thin and tough. She'd cut her hair like a boy's. Elena Asado was a tight wire of a woman, femininity jerked away by her need to revenge herself on Adam Tesler by destroying the world order his gift of resurrection had created. Not gift. Never gift. He was not Jesus, who offered eternal life to whoever believed. No profit in belief. Adam Tesler took everything and left you your soul. If you could sustain the heavy inmortalidad payments, insurance would take you into post-life debt-free. The other 90 percent of Earth's dead worked out their salvation through indenture contracts to the Death House, the Tesler Thanos corporada's agent of resurrection. The contratos were centuries long. Time was the province of the dead. They were cheap. "The Ewart/OzWest affair has them rattled," Elena Asado said. "A handful of contradados renege on their contracts out on some asteroid, and they're afraid the sky is going to fall on their heads?" "They're calling themselves the Freedead. You give a thing a name, you give it power. They know it's the beginning. Ewart/OzWest, all the other orbital and deep-space manufacturing corporadas; they always knew they could never enforce their contracts off Earth. They've lost already. Space belongs to the dead," the meat woman said. Sol crossed the big room to the other window, the safe window that looked down from the high hills over the night city. His palm print deconfigured the glass. Night, city night perfumed with juniper and sex and smoke and the dusky heat of the heat of the day, curled around him. He went to the balcony rail. The boulevards shimmered like a map of a mind, but there was a great dark amnesia at its heart, an amorphous zone where lights were not, where the geometry of the grid was abolished. St. John.

Necroville. Dead town. The city of the dead, a city within a city, walled and moated and guarded with the same weapons that swept the boulevards. City of curfew. Each dusk, the artificial aurora twenty kilometers above the Tres Valles Metropolitan Area would pulse red: the skysign, commanding all the three million dead to return from the streets of the living to their necrovilles. They passed through five gates, each in the shape of a massive V bisected by a horizontal line. The entropic flesh life descending, the eternal resurrected life ascending, through the dividing line of death. That was the law, that plane of separation. Dead was dead, living was living. As incompatible as night and day. That same sign was fused into the palm of every resurrectee that stepped from the Death House Jesus tanks. Not true, he thought. Not all are reborn with stigmata. Not all obey curfew. He held his hand before his face, studied the lines and creases, as if seeking a destiny written there. He had seen the deathsign in the palm of Elena's housegirl, and how it flashed in time to the aurora. "Still can't believe it's real?" He had not heard Elena come onto the balcony behind him. He felt the touch of her hand on his hair, his shoulder, his bare arm. Skin on skin. "The Nez Perce tribe believe the world ended on the third day, and what we are living in are the dreams of the last night. I fell. I hit that white light and it was hard. Hard as diamond. Maybe I dream I live, and my dreams are the last shattered moments of my life." "Would you dream it like this?" "No," he said after a time. "I can't recognize anything any more. I can't see how it connects to what I last remember. So much is missing." "I couldn't make a move until I was sure he didn't suspect. He'd done a thorough job." "He would." "I never believed that story about the lifter crash. The universe may be ironic, but it's never neat." "I think a lot about the poor bastard pilot he took out as well, just to make it neat." The air carried the far sound of drums from down in the dead town. Tomorrow was the great feast, the Night of All the Dead. "Five years," he said. He heard the catch in her breathing and knew what she would say next, and what would follow. "What is it like, being dead?" Elena Asado asked. In his weeks imprisoned in the hill house, an unlawful dead, signless and contractless, he had learned that she did not mean, what was it like to be resurrected. She wanted to know about the darkness before. "Nothing," he answered, as he always did, but though it was true, it was not the truth, for nothing is a product of human consciousness and the darkness beyond the shattering hard light at terminal vee on Hoover Boulevard was the end of all consciousness. No dreams, no time, no loss, no light, no dark. No thing.

Now her fingers were stroking his skin, feeling for some of the chill of the nothing. He turned from the city and picked her up and carried her to the big empty bed. A month of new life was enough to learn the rules of the game. He took her in the big, wide white bed by the glow from the city beneath, and it was as chill and formulaic as every other time. He knew that for her it was more than sex with her lover come back from a far exile. He could feel in the twitch and splay of her muscles that what made it special for her was that he was dead. It delighted and repelled her. He suspected that she was incapable of orgasm with fellow meat. It did not trouble him, being her fetish. The body once known as Solomon Gursky knew another thing, that only the dead could know. It was that not everything that died was resurrected. The shape, the self, the sentience came back, but love did not pass through death. Afterward, she liked him to talk about his resurrection, when no-thing became thing and he saw her face looking down through the swirl of tectors. This night he did not talk. He asked. He asked, "What was I like?" "Your body?" she said. He let her think that. "You want to see the morgue photographs again?" He knew the charred grin of a husk well enough. Hands flat at his sides. That was how she had known right away. Burn victims died with their fists up, fighting incineration. "Even after I'd had you exhumed, I couldn't bring you back. I know you told me that he said I was safe, for the moment, but that moment was too soon. The technology wasn't sophisticated enough, and he would have known right away. I'm sorry I had to keep you on ice." "I hardly noticed," he joked. "I always meant to. It was planned; get out of Tesler Thanos, then contract an illegal Jesus tank down in St. John. The Death House doesn't know one tenth of what's going on in there." "Thank you," Sol Gursky said, and then he felt it. He felt it and he saw it as if it were his own body. She felt him tighten. "Another flashback?" "No," he said. "The opposite. Get up." "What?" she said. He was already pulling on leather and silk. "That moment Adam gave you." "Yes?" "It's over." The car was morphed into low and fast configuration. At the bend where the avenue slung itself down the hillside, they both felt the pressure wave of something large and flying pass over them, very low, utterly silent. "Leave the car," he ordered. The doors were already gull-winged open. Three steps and the house went up behind them in a rave of white light. It seemed to suck at them, drawing them back into its annihilating

gravity, then the shock swept them and the car and every homeless thing on the avenue before it. Through the screaming house alarms and the screaming householders and the rush and roar of the conflagration, Sol heard the aircraft turn above the vaporized hacienda. He seized Elena's hand and ran. The lifter passed over them and the car vanished in a burst of white energy. "Jesus, nanotok warheads!" Elena gasped as they tumbled down through tiered and terraced gardens. The lifter turned high on the air, eclipsing the hazy stars, hunting with extra-human senses. Below, formations of seguridados were spreading out through the gardens. "How did you know?" Elena gasped. "I saw it," said Solomon Gursky as they crashed a pool party and sent bacchanalian cerristos scampering for cover. Down, down. Augmented cyberhounds growled and quested with long-red eyes; domestic defense grids stirred, captured images, alerted the police. "Saw?" asked Elena Asado. APVs and city pods cut smoking hexagrams in the highway blacktop as Sol and Elena came crashing out of the service alley onto the boulevard. Horns. Lights. Fervid curses. Grind of wheels. Shriek of brakes. Crack of smashing tectoplastic, doubled, redoubled. Grid-pile on the westway. A mopedcab was pulled in at a tortilleria on the right shoulder. The cochero was happy to pass up his enchiladas for Elena's hard, black currency. Folding, clinking stuff. "Where to?" The destruction his passengers had wreaked impressed him. Taxi drivers universally hate cars. "Drive," Solomon Gursky said. The machine kicked out onto the strip. "It's still up there," Elena said, squinting out from under the canopy at the night sky. "They won't do anything in this traffic." "They did it up there on the avenue." Then: "You said you saw. What do you mean, saw?" "You know death, when you're dead," Solomon Gursky said. "You know its face, its mask, its smell. It has a perfume, you can smell it from a long way off, like the pheromones of moths. It blows upwind in time." "Hey," the cochero said, who was poor, but live meat. "You know anything about that big boom up on the hill? What was that, lifter crash or something?" "Or something," Elena said. "Keep driving." "Need to know where to keep driving to, lady."

"Necroville," Solomon Gursky said. St. John. City of the Dead. The place beyond law, morality, fear, love, all the things that so tightly bound the living. The outlaw city. To Elena he said, "If you're going to bring down Adam Tesler, you can only do it from the outside, as an outsider." He said this in English. The words were heavy and tasted strange on his lips. "You must do it as one of the dispossessed. One of the dead." To have tried to run the fluorescent vee-slash of the Necroville gate would have been as certain a Big Death as to have been reduced to hot ion dust in the nanotok flash. The mopedcab prowled past the samurai silhouettes of the gate seguridados. Sol had the driver leave them beneath the dusty palms on a deserted boulevard pressed up hard against the razor wire of St. John. Abandoned by the living, the grass verges had run verdant, scum and lilies scabbed the swimming pools, the generous Spanish-style houses softly disintegrating, digested by their own gardens. It gave the cochero spooky vibes, but Sol liked it. He knew these avenues. The little machine putt-putted off for the lands of the fully living. "There are culverted streams all round here," Sol said. "Some go right under the defenses, into Necroville." "Is this your dead sight again?" Elena asked as he started down an overhung service alley. "In a sense. I grew up around here." "I didn't know that." "Then I can trust it." She hesitated a step. "What are you accusing me of?" "How much did you rebuild, Elena?" "Your memories are your own, Sol. We loved each other, once." "Once," he said, and then he felt it, a static purr on his skin, like Elena's fingers over his whole body at once. This was not the psychic bloom of death foreseen. This was physics, the caress of focused gravity fields. They hit the turn of the alley as the mechadors came dropping soft and slow over the roofs of the old moldering residencias. Across a weed-infested tennis court was a drainage ditch defended by a rusted chicken-wire fence. Sol heaved away an entire section. Adam Tesler had built his dead strong, and fast. The refugees followed the seeping, rancid water down to a rusted grille in a culvert. "Now we see if the Jesus tank grew me true," Sol said as he kicked in the grille. "If what I remember is mine, then we come up in St. John. If not, we end up inthe bay three days from now with our eyes eaten out by chlorine." They ducked into the culvert as a mechador passed over. MIST 27s sent the mud and water up in a blast of spray and battle tectors. The dead man and the living woman splashed on into darkness.

"He loved you, you know," Sol said. "That's why he's doing this. He is a jealous God. I always knew he wanted you, more than that bitch he calls a wife. While I was dead, he could pretend that it might still be. He could overlook what you were trying to do to him; you can't hurt him, Elena, not on your own. But when you brought me back, he couldn't pretend any longer. He couldn't turn a blind eye. He couldn't forgive you." "A pretty God," Elena said, water eddying around her leather-clad calves. Ahead, a light from a circle in the roof of the culvert marked a drain from the street. They stood under it a moment, feeling the touch of the light of Necroville on their faces. Elena reached up to push open the grate. Solomon Gursky stayed her, turned her palm upward to the light. "One thing." he said. He picked a sharp shard of concrete from the tunnel wall. With three strong savage strokes he cut the vee and slash of the death sign in her flesh. THURSDAY He was three kilometers down the mass driver when the fleet hit Marlene Dietrich. St. Judy's Comet was five AU from perihelion and out of ecliptic, the Clade thirty-six degrees out, but for an instant two suns burned in the sky. The folds of transparent tectoplastic skin over Solomon Gursky's face opaqued. His sur-arms gripped the spiderwork of the interstellar engine, rocked by the impact on his electromagnetic senses of fifty minitok warheads converting into bevawatts of hard energy. The death scream of a nation. Three hundred Freedead had cluttered the freefall warren of tunnels that honeycombed the asteroid. Marlene Dietrich had been the seed of the rebellion. The corporadas cherished their grudges. Solomon Gursky's face-shield cleared. The light of Marlene Dietrich's dying was short-lived but its embers faded in his infravision toward the stellar background. Elena spoke in his skull. You know? Though she was enfolded in the command womb half a kilometer deep within the comet, she was naked to the universe through identity links to the sensor web in the crust and a nimbus of bacterium-sized spyships weaving through the tenuous gas halo. I saw it, Solomon Gursky subvocalized. They'll come for us now, Elena said. You think. Using his bas-arms Sol clambered along the slender spine of the mass driver toward the micro meteorite impact. I know. When long-range cleared after the blast, we caught the signatures of blip-fusion burns. Hand over hand over hand over hand. One of the first things you learn, when the Freedead change you,

is that in space it is all a question of attitude. A third of the way down a nine-kilometer mass driver with several billion tons of Oort comet spiked on it, you don't think up, you don't think down. Up, and it is vertigo. Down, and a two kilometer sphere of grubby ice is poised above your head by a thread of superconducting tectoplastic. Out, that was the only way to think of it and stay sane. Away, and back again. How many drives? Sol asked. The impact pin-pointed itself; the smart plastic fluoresced orange when wounded. Eight. A sub-voiced blasphemy. They didn't even make them break sweat. How long have we got? Elena flashed the projections through the em-link onto his visual cortex. Curves of light through darkness and time, warped across the gravitation marches of Jupiter. Under current acceleration, the Earth fleet would be within strike in eighty-two hours. The war in heaven was in its twelfth year. Both sides had determined that this was to be the last. The NightFreight War would be fought to an outcome. They called themselves the Clades, the outlaw descendants of the original Ewart/OzWest asteroid rebellion: a handful of redoubts scattered across the appalling distances of the solar system. Marlene Dietrich, the first to declare freedom; Neruro, a half-completed twenty kilometer wheel of tectoplastic attended by O'Neill can utilities, agriculture tanks, and habitation bubbles, the aspirant capital of the space Dead. Ares Orbital, dreaming of tectoformed Mars in the pumice pore spaces of Phobos and Deimos; the Pale Gallileans, surfing over the icescapes of Europa on an improbable raft of cables and spars; the Shepherd Moons, dwellers on the edge of the abyss, sailing the solar wind through Saturn's rings. Toe-holds, shallow scratchings, space-hovels; but the stolen nanotechnology burgeoned in the energy-rich environment of space. An infinite ecological niche. The Freedead knew they were the inheritors of the universe. The meat corporadas had withdrawn to the orbit of their planet. For a time. When they struck, they struck decisively. The Tsiolkovski Clade on the dark side of the moon was the first to fall as the battle groups of the corporadas thrust outward. The delicate film of vacuum-compatible tectoformed forest that carpeted the crater was seared away in the alpha strike. By the time the last strike went in, a new five-kilometer-deep crater of glowing tufa replaced the tunnels and excavations of the old lunar mining base. Earth's tides had trembled as the moon staggered in its orbit. Big Big Death. The battle groups moved toward their primary targets. The corporadas had learned much embargoed under their atmosphere. The new ships were lean, mean, fast: multiple missile racks clipped to high-gee blip-fusion motors, pilots suspended in acceleration gel like flies in amber, hooked by every orifice into the big battle virtualizers. Thirteen-year-old boys had the best combination of reaction time and viciousness. Now the blazing teenagers had wantonly destroyed the Marlene Dietrich Clade. Ares Orbital was wide open; Neruro, where most of the Freedead slamship fleet was based, would fight hard. Two corporada ships had been dispatched Jupiterward. Orbital mechanics gave the defenseless Pale Gallileans fifteen months to contemplate their own annihilation. But the seed has flown, Solomon Gursky thought silently, out on the mass driver of St. Judy's Comet.

Where we are going, neither your most powerful ships nor your most vicious boys can reach us. The micrometeorite impact had scrambled the tectoplastic's limited intelligence: fibers and filaments of smart polymer twined and coiled, seeking completion and purpose. Sol touched his sur-hands to the surfaces. He imagined he could feel the order pass out of him, like a prickle of tectors osmosing through vacuum-tight skin. Days of miracles and wonder, Adam, he thought. And because you are jealous that we are doing things with your magic you never dreamed, you would blast us all to photons. The breach was repaired. The mass driver trembled and kicked a pellet into space, and another, and another. And Sol Gursky, working his way hand over hand over hand over hand down the device that was taking him to the stars, saw the trick of St. Judy's Comet. A ball of fuzzy ice drawing a long tail behind it. Not a seed, but a sperm, swimming through the big dark. Thus we impregnate the universe. St. Judy's Comet. Petite as Oort cloud family members go: two point eight by one point seven by two point two kilometers. (Think of the misshaped potato you push to the side of your plate because anything that looks that weird is sure to give you cramps.) Undernourished, at sixty-two billion tons. Waif and stray of the solar system, wandering slow and lonely back out into the dark after her hour in the sun (but not too close, burn you real bad, too much sun) when these dead people snatch her, grope her all over, shove things up her ass, mess with her insides, make her do strange and unnatural acts, like shitting tons of herself away every second at a good percentage of the speed of light. Don't you know you ain't no comet no more? You're a starship. See up there, in the Swan, just to the left of that big bright star? There's a little dim star you can't see. That's where you're going, little St. Judy. Take some company. Going to be a long trip. And what will I find when I get there? A big bastard MACHO of gas supergiant orbiting 61 Cygni at the distance of Saturn from the sun, that's what you'll find. Just swarming with moons; one of them should be right for terrestrial life. And if not, no matter; sure, what's the difference between tectoforming an asteroid, or a comet, or the moon of an extra-solar gas super-giant? Just scale. You see, we've got everything we need to tame a new solar system right here with us. It's all just carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen, and you have that in abundance. And maybe we like you so much that we find we don't even need a world at all. Balls of muck and gravity, hell; we're the Freedead. Space and time belong to us. It was Solomon Gursky, born in another century, who gave the ship its name. In that other century, he had owned a large and eclectic record collection. On vinyl. The twenty living dead crew of St. Judy's Comet gathered in the command womb embedded in sixty-two billion tons of ice to plan battle. The other five hundred and forty were stored as superconducting tector matrices in a helium ice core; the dead dead, to be resurrected out of comet stuff at their new home. The crew hovered in nanogee in a score of different orientations around the free-floating instrument clusters. They were strange and beautiful, as gods and angels are. Like angels, they flew. Like gods in some pantheons, they were four-armed. Fine, manipulating sur-arms; strong grasping bas-arms growing from a lower spine reconfigured by Jesus tanks into powerful anterior shoulder-blades. Their vacuum-and-radiation-tight skins were photosynthetic, and as beautifully marked and colored as a hunting animal's. Stripes, swirls of green on orange, blue on black, fractal patterns, flags of legendary nations, tattoos. Illustrated humans. Elena Asado, caressed by tendrils from the sensor web gave them the stark news. Fluorescent patches on shoulders, hips, and groin glowed when she spoke.

"The bastards have jumped vee. They must have burned every last molecule of hydrogen in their thruster tanks to do it. Estimated to strike range is now sixty-four hours." The capitan of St. Judy's Comet, a veteran of the Marlene Dietrich rebellion, shifted orientation to face Jorge, the ship's reconfiguration engineer. "Long range defenses?" Capitan Savita's skin was an exquisite mottle of pale green bamboo leaves in sun yellow, an incongruous contrast to the tangible anxiety in the command womb. "First wave missiles will be fully grown and launch-ready in twenty-six hours. The fighters, no. The best I can push the assemblers up to is sixty-six hours." "What can you do in time?" Sol Gursky asked. "With your help, I could simplify the fighter design for close combat." "How close?" Capitan Savita asked. "Under a hundred kays." "How simplified?" Elena asked. "Little more than an armed exo-skeleton with maneuvering pods." And they need to be clever every time, Sol thought. The meat need to be clever only once. *** Space war was as profligate with time as it was with energy and distance. With the redesigns growing, Sol Gursky spent most of the twenty-six hours to missile launch on the ice, naked to the stars, imagining their warmth on his face-shield. Five years since he had woken from his second death in a habitat bubble out at Marlene Dietrich, and stars had never ceased to amaze him. When you come back, you are tied to the first thing you see. Beyond the transparent tectoplastic bubble, it had been stars. The first time, it had been Elena. Tied together in life, now in death. Necroville had not been sanctuary. The place beyond the law only gave Adam Tesler new and more colorful opportunities to incarnate his jealousy. The Benthic Lords, they had called themselves. Wild, free, dead. They probably had not known they were working for Tesler-Thanos, but they took her out in a dead bar on Terminal Boulevard. With a game-fishing harpoon. They carved their skull symbol on her forehead, a rebuttal of the deathsign Sol had cut in her palm. Now you are really dead, meat. He had known they would never be safe on Earth. The companeros in the Death House had faked the off-world NightFreight contracts. The pill Sol took had been surprisingly bitter, the dive into the white light as hard as he remembered. Stars. You could lose yourself in them; spirit strung out, orb gazing. Somewhere out there was a still-invisible constellation of eight, tight formation, silent running. Killing stars. Death stars. Everyone came up to watch the missiles launch from the black foramens grown out of the misty ice. The chemical motors burned at twenty kays: a sudden galaxy of white stars. They watched them fade from

sight. Twelve hours to contact. No one expected them to do any more than waste a few thousand rounds of the meat's point defenses. In a dozen manufacturing pods studded around St. Judy's dumpy waist, Jorge and Sol's fighters gestated. Their slow accretion, molecule by molecule, fascinated Sol. Evil dark things, St. Andrew's crosses cast in melted bone. At the center a human-shaped cavity. You flew spread-eagled. Bas-hands gripped thruster controls; sur-hands armed and aimed the squirt lasers. Dark flapping things Sol had glimpsed once before flocked again at the edges of his consciousness. He had cheated the dark premonitory angels that other time. He would sleight them again. The first engagement of the battle of St. Judy's Comet was at 01:45 GMT. Solomon Gursky watched it with his crewbrethren in the ice-wrapped warmth of the command womb. His virtualized sight perceived space in three dimensions. Those blue cylinders were the corporada ships. That white swarm closing from a hundred different directions, the missiles. One approached a blue cylinder and burst. Another, and another; then the inner display was a glare of novas as the first wave was annihilated. The backup went in. The vanguard exploded in beautiful futile blossoms of light. Closer. They were getting closer before the meat shredded them. Sol watched a warhead loop up from due south, streak toward the point ship, and annihilate it in a red flash. The St. Judy's Cometeers cheered. One gone, reduced to bubbling slag bytectors sprayed from the warhead. One was all they got. It was down to the fighter pilots now. Sol and Elena made love in the count-up to launch. Bas-arms and sur-arms locked in the freegee of the forward observation blister. Stars described slow arcs across the transparent dome, like a sky. Love did not pass through death; Elena had realized this bitter truth about what she had imagined she had shared with Solomon Gursky in her house on the hillside. But love could grow, and become a thing shaped for eternity. When the fluids had dried on their skins, they sealed their soft, intimate places with vacuum-tight skin and went up to the launch bays. Sol fitted her into the scooped-out shell. Tectoplastic fingers gripped Elena's body and meshed with her skin circuitry. The angel-suit came alive. There was a trick they had learned in their em-telepathy; a massaging of the limbic system like an inner kiss. One mutual purr of pleasure, then she cast off, suit still dripping gobs of frozen tectopolymer. St. Judy's defenders would fight dark and silent; that mental kiss would be the last radio contact until it was decided. Solomon Gursky watched the blue stutter of the thrusters merge with the stars. Reaction mass was limited; those who returned from the fight would jettison their angel-suits and glide home by solar sail. Then he went below to monitor the battle through the tickle of molecules in his frontal lobes. St. Judy's Angels formed two squadrons: one flying anti-missile defense, the other climbing high out of the ecliptic to swoop down on the corporada ships and destroy them before they could empty their weapon racks. Elena was in the close defense group. Her angelship icon was identified in Sol's inner vision in red on gold tiger stripes of her skin. He watched her weave intricate orbits around St. Judy's Comet as the blue cylinders of the meat approached the plane labeled "strike range." Suddenly, seven blue icons spawned a cloud of actinic sparks, raining down on St. Judy's Comet like fireworks. "Jesus Joseph Mary!" someone swore quietly.

"Fifty-five gees," Capitan Savita said calmly. "Time to contact, one thousand and eighteen seconds." "They'll never get them all," said Kobe with the Mondrian skin pattern, who had taken Elena's place in remote sensing. "We have one hundred and fifteen contacts in the first wave," Jorge announced. "Sol, I need delta vee," Savita said. "More than a thousandth of a gravity and the mass driver coils will warp," Sol said, calling overlays onto his visual cortex. "Anything that throws a curve into their computations," Savita said. "I'll see how close I can push it." He was glad to have to lose himself in the problems of squeezing a few millimeters per second squared out of the big electromagnetic gun, because then he would not be able to see the curve and swoop of attack vectors and intercept planes as the point defense group closed with the missiles. Especially he would not have to watch the twine and loop of the tiger-striped cross and fear that at any instant it would intersect with a sharp blue curve in a flash of annihilation. One by one, those blue stars were going out, he noticed, but slowly. Too slowly. Too few. The computer gave him a solution. He fed it to the mass driver. The shift of acceleration was as gentle as a catch of breath. Thirty years since he had covered his head in a synagogue, but Sol Gursky prayed to Yahweh that it would be enough. One down already; Emilio's spotted indigo gone, and half the missiles were still on trajectory. Time to impact ticked down impassively in the upper right corner of his virtual vision. Six hundred and fifteen seconds. Ten minutes to live. But the attack angels were among the corporadas, dodging the brilliant flares of short range interceptor drones. The meat fleet tried to scatter, but the ships were low on reaction mass, ungainly, unmaneuverable. St. Judy's Angels dived and sniped among them, clipping a missile rack here, a solar panel there, ripping open life support bubbles and fuel tanks in slow explosions of outgassing hydrogen. The thirteen-year-old pilots died, raging with chemical-induced fury, spilled out into vacuum in tears of flash-frozen acceleration gel. The attacking fleet dwindled from seven to five to three ships. But it was no abattoir of the meat; of the six dead angels that went in, only two pulled away into rendezvous orbit, laser capacitors dead, reaction mass spent. The crews ejected, unfurled their solar sails, shields of light. Two meat ships survived. One used the last grams of his maneuvering mass to warp into a return orbit; the other routed his thruster fuel through his blip drive; headlong for St. Judy. "He's going for a ram," Kobe said. "Sol, get us away from him," Capitan Savita ordered.

"He's too close." The numbers in Sol's skull were remorseless. "Even if I cut the mass driver, he can still run life support gas through the STUs to compensate." The command womb quivered. "Fuck," someone swore reverently. "Near miss," Kobe reported. "Direct hit if Sol hadn't given us gees." "Mass driver is still with us," Sol said. "Riley's gone," Capitan Savita said. Fifty missiles were now twenty missiles but Emilio and Riley were dead, and the range was closing. Little room for maneuver; none for mistakes. "Two hundred and fifteen seconds to ship impact," Kobe announced. The main body of missiles was dropping behind St. Judy's Comet. Ogawa and Skin, Mandelbrot set and Dalmatian spots, were fighting a rearguard as the missiles tried to reacquire their target. Olive green ripples and red tiger stripes swung round to face the meat ship. Quinsana and Elena. Jesus Joseph Mary, but it was going to be close! Sol wished he did not have the graphics in his head. He wished not to have to see. Better sudden annihilation, blindness and ignorance shattered by destroying light. To see, to know, to count the digits on the timer, was as cruel as execution. But the inner vision has no eyelids. So he watched, impotent, as Quinsana's olive green cross was pierced and shattered by a white flare from the meat ship. And he watched as Elena raked the meat with her lasers and cut it into quivering chunks, and the blast of engines destroying themselves sent the shards of ship arcing away from St. Judy's Comet. And he could only watch, and not look away, as Elena turned too slow, too little, too late, as the burst seed-pod of the environment unit tore off her thruster legs and light sail and sent her spinning end over end, crippled, destroyed. "Elena!" he screamed in both his voices. "Elena! Oh Jesus oh God!" But he had never believed in either of them, and so they let Elena Asado go tumbling endlessly toward the beautiful galaxy clusters of Virgo. Earth's last rage against her children expired: twenty missiles dwindled to ten, to five, to one. To none. St. Judy's Comet continued her slow climb out of the sun's gravity well, into the deep dark and the deeper cold. Its five hundred and twenty souls slept sound and ignorant as only the dead can in tombs of ice. Soon Solomon Gursky and the others would join them, and be dissolved into the receiving ice, and die for five hundred years while St. Judy's Comet made the crossing to another star. If it were sleep, then I might forget, Solomon Gursky thought. In sleep, things changed, memories became dreams, dreams memories. In sleep, there was time, and time was change, and perhaps a chance of forgetting the vision of her, spinning outward forever, rebuilt by the same forces that had already resurrected her once, living on sunlight, unable to die. But it was not sleep to which he was going. It was death, and that was nothing any more.

FRIDAY Together they watched the city burn. It was one of the ornamental cities of the plain that the Long Scanning folk built and maintained for the quadrennial eisteddfods. There was something of the flower in the small, jewellike city, and something of the spiral, and something of the sea-wave. It would have been as accurate to call it a vast building as a miniature city. It burned most elegantly. The fault line ran right through the middle of it. The fissure was clean and precise— no less to be expected of the Long Scanning folk— and bisected the curvilinear architecture from top to bottom. The land still quivered to aftershocks. It could have repaired itself. It could have doused the flames— a short in the magma tap, the man reckoned— reshaped the melted ridges and roofs, erased the scorch marks, bridged the cracks and chasms. But its tector systems were directionless, its soul withdrawn to the Heaven Tree, to join the rest of the Long Scanning people on their exodus. The woman watched the smoke rise into the darkening sky, obscuring the great opal of Urizen. "It doesn't have to do this," she said. Her skin spoke of sorrow mingled with puzzlement. "They've no use for it any more," the man said. "And there's a certain beauty in destruction." "It scares me," the woman said, and her skin pattern agreed. "I've never seen anything end before." Lucky, the man thought, in a language that had come from another world. An eddy in his weathersight: big one coming. But they were all big ones since the orbital perturbations began. Big, getting bigger. At the end, the storms would tear the forests from their roots as the atmosphere shrieked into space. That afternoon, on their journey to the man's memories, they had come across an empty marina; drained, sand clogged, pontoons torn and tossed by tsunamis. Its crew of boats they found scattered the length of a half-hour's walk. Empty shells stogged to the waist in dune faces, masts and sails hung from trees. The weather had been the first thing to tear free from control. The man felt a sudden tautness in the woman's body. She was seeing it to, the mid-game of the end of the world. By the time they reached the sheltered valley that the man's aura had picked as the safest location to spend the night, the wind had risen to draw soft moans and chords from the curves and crevasses of the dead city. As their cloaks of elementals joined and sank the roots of the night shell into rock, a flock of bubbles bowled past, trembling and iridescent in the gusts. The woman caught one on her hand; the tiny creature-machine clung for a moment, feeding from her biofield. Its transparent skin raced with oil-film colors, it quaked and burst, a melting bubble of tectoplasm. The woman watched it until the elementals had completed the shelter, but the thing stayed dead. Their love-making was both urgent and chilled under the scalloped carapace the elementals had sculpted from rock silica. Sex and death, the man said in the part of his head where not even his sub-vocal withspeech could overhear and transmit. An alien thought.

She wanted to talk afterward. She liked to talk after sex. Unusually, she did not ask him to tell her about how he and the other Five Hundred Fathers had built the world. Her idea of talking was him talking. Tonight she did not want to talk about the world's beginning. She wanted him to talk about its ending. "Do you know what I hate about it? It's not that it's all going to end, all this. It's that a bubble burst in my hand, and I can't comprehend what happened to it. How much more our whole world?" "There is a word for what you felt," the man interjected gently. The gyrestorm was at its height, raging over the dome of their shell. The thickness of a skin is all that is keeping the wind from stripping the flesh from my bones, he thought. But the tectors' grip on the bedrock was firm and sure. "The word is die." The woman sat with her knees pulled up, arms folded around them. Naked: the gyrestorm was blowing through her soul. "What I hate," she said after silence, "is that I have so little time to see and feel it all before it's taken away into the cold and the dark." She was a Green, born in the second of the short year's fast seasons: a Green of the Hidden Design people; first of the Old Red Ridge pueblo people to come into the world in eighty years. And the last. Eight years old. "You won't die," the man said, skin patterning in whorls of reassurance and paternal concern, like the swirling storms of great Urizen beyond the hurtling gyrestorm clouds. "You can't die. No one will die." "I know that. No one will die, we will all be changed, or sleep with the world. But ..." "Is it frightening, to have to give up this body?" She touched her forehead to her knees, shook her head. "I don't want to lose it. I've only begun to understand what it is, this body, this world, and it's all going to be taken away from me, and all the powers that are my birthright are useless." "There are forces beyond even nanotechnology," the man said. "It makes us masters of matter, but the fundamental dimensions— gravity, space, time— it cannot touch." "Why?" the woman said, and to the man, who counted by older, longer years, she spoke in the voice of her terrestrial age. "We will learn it, in time," the man said, which he knew was no answer. The woman knew it too, for she said, "While Orc is two hundred million years from the warmth of the next sun, and its atmosphere is a frozen glaze on these mountains and valleys." Grief, he skin said. Rage. Loss. The two-thousand-year-old father touched the young woman's small, upturned breasts. "We knew Urizen's orbit was unstable, but no one could have predicted the interaction with Ulro." Ironic: that this world named after Blake's fire daemon should be the one cast into darkness and ice, while Urizen and its surviving moons should bake two million kilometers above the surface of Los.

"Sol, you don't need to apologize to me for mistakes you made two thousand years ago," said the woman, whose name was Lenya. "But I think I need to apologize to the world," said Sol Gursky. Lenya's skin-speech now said hope shaded with inevitability. Her nipples were erect. Sol bent to them again as the wind from the end of the world scratched its claws over the skin of tectoplastic. In the morning, they continued the journey to Sol's memories. The gyrestorm had blown itself out in the Oothoon mountains. What remained of the ghost-net told Sol and Lenya that it was possible to fly that day. They suckled milch from the shell's tree of life processor, and they had sex again on the dusty earth while the elementals reconfigured the night pod into a general utility flier. For the rest of the morning, they passed over a plain across which grazebeasts and the tall, predatory angularities of the stalking Systems Maintenance people moved like ripples on a lake, drawn to the Heaven Tree planted in the navel of the world. Both grazers and herders had been human once. At noon, the man and the woman encountered a flyer of the Generous Sky people, flapping a silk-winged course along the thermal lines rising from the feet of the Big Chrysolite mountains. Sol with-hailed him, and they set down together in a clearing in the bitter-root forests that carpeted much of Coryphee Canton. The Generous Sky man's etiquette would normally have compelled him to disdain those ground bound who sullied the air with machines, but in these urgent times, the old ways were breaking. Whither bound? Sol withspoke him. Static crackled in his skull. The lingering tail of the gyrestorm was throwing off electromagnetic disturbances. Why, the Heaven Tree of course, the winged man said. He was a horrifying kite of translucent skin over stick bones and sinews. His breast was like the prow of a ship, his muscles twitched and realigned as he shifted from foot to foot, uncomfortable on the earth. A gentle breeze wafted from the nanofans grown out of the web of skin between wrists and ankles. The air smelled of strange sweat. Whither yourselves? The Heaven Tree also, in time, Sol said. But I must first recover my memories. Ah, a father, the Sky man said. Whose are you? Hidden Design, Sol said. I am father to this woman and her people. You are Solomon Gursky, the flying man withsaid. My progenitor is Nikos Samitreides. I remember her well, though I have not seen her in many years. She fought bravely at the battle of St. Judy's Comet. I am third of her lineage. Eighteen hundred years I have been on this world. A question, if I may. Lenya's withspeech was a sudden bright interruption in the dialogue of old men. Using an honorific by which a younger adult addresses an experienced senior, she asked, When the time comes, how will you change?

An easy question, the Generous Sky man said, I shall undergo the reconfiguration for life on Urizen. To me, it is little difference whether I wear the outward semblance of a man, or a jetpowered aerial manta: it is flying, and such flying! Canyons of clouds hundreds of kilometers deep; five thousand kilometer per hour winds; thermals great as continents; mad storms as big as planets! And no land, no base; to be able to fly forever free from the tyranny of Earth. The song cycles we shall compose; eddas that will carry half way around the planet on the jet streams of Urizen! The Generous Sky man's eyes had closed in rapture. They suddenly opened. His nostrils dilated, sensing an atmospheric change intangible to the others. Another storm is coming, bigger than the last. I advise you to take shelter within rock, for this will pluck the bitter-roots from the soil. He spread his wings. The membranes rippled. A tiny hop, and the wind caught him and in an instant carried him up into a thermal. Sol and Lenya watched him glide the tops of the lifting air currents until he was lost in the deep blue sky. For exercise and the conversation of the way, they walked that afternoon. They followed the migration track of the Rough Trading people through the tieve forests of south Coryphee and Emberwilde Cantons. Toward evening, with the gathering wind stirring the needles of the tieves to gossip, they met a man of the Ash species sitting on a chair in a small clearing among the trees. He was long and coiling, and his skin said that he was much impoverished from lack of a host. Lenya offered her arm, and though the Ash man's compatibility was more with the Buried Communication people than the Hidden Design, he gracefully accepted her heat, her morphic energy, and a few drops of blood. "Where is your host?" Lenya asked him. A parasite, he had the languages of most nations. Hosts were best seduced by words, like lovers. "He has gone with the herds," the Ash man said. "To the Heaven Tree. It is ended." "And what will you do when Orc is expelled?" The rasp marks on Lenya's forearm where the parasitic man had sipped her blood were already healing over. "I cannot live alone," the Ash man said. "I shall ask the earth to open and swallow me and kill me. I shall sleep in the earth until the warmth of a new sun awakens me to life again." "But that will be two hundred million years," Lenya said. The Ash man looked at her with the look that said, one year, one million years, one hundred million years, they are nothing to death. Because she knew that the man thought her a new-hatched fool, Lenya felt compelled to look back at him as she and Sol walked away along the tieve tracks. She saw the parasite pressed belly and balls to the ground, as he would to a host. Dust spiraled up around him. He slowly sank into the earth. Sol and Lenya did not have sex that night in the pod for the first time since Solomon the Traveler had come to the Old Red Ridge pueblo and taken the eye and heart of the brown girl dancing in the ring. That night there was the greatest earthquake yet as Orc kicked in his orbit, and even a shell of tectodiamond seemed inadequate protection against forces that would throw a planet into interstellar space. They held each other, not speaking, until the earth grew quiet and a wave of heat passed over the carapace, which was the tieve forests of Emberwilde Canton burning. The next morning, they morphed the pod into an ash-runner and drove through the cindered forest, until at noon they came to the edge of the Inland Sea. The tectonic trauma had sent tidal waves swamping the

craggy islet on which Sol had left his memories, but the self-repair systems had used the dregs of their stored power to rebuild the damaged architecture. As Sol was particular that they must approach his memories by sea, they ordered the ash-runner to reconfigure into a skiff. While the tectors moved molecules, a man of the Blue Mana pulled himself out of the big surf on to the red shingle. He was long and huge and sleek; his shorn turf of fur was beautifully marked. He lay panting from the exertion of heaving himself from his customary element into an alien one. Lenya addressed him familiarly— Hidden Design and the amphibious Blue Mana had been one until a millennium ago— and asked him the same question she had put to the others she had encountered on the journey. "I am already reconfiguring my body fat into an aircraft to take me to the Heaven Tree," the Blue Mana said. "Climatic shifts permitting." "Is it bad in the sea?" Sol Gursky asked. "The seas feel the changes first," the amphiman said. "Bad. Yes, most bad. I cannot bear the thought of Mother Ocean freezing clear to her beds." "Will you go to Urizen, then?" Lenya asked, thinking that swimming must be much akin to flying. "Why, bless you, no." The Blue Mana man's skin spelled puzzled surprise. "Why should I share any less fate than Mother Ocean? We shall both end in ice." "The comet fleet," Sol Gursky said. "If the Earth ship left any legacy, it is that there are many mansions in this universe where we may live. I have a fancy to visit those other settled systems that the ship told us of, experience those others ways of being human." A hundred Orc-years had passed since the second comet-ship from Earth had entered the Los system to refuel from Urizen's rings, but the news it had carried of a home system transfigured by the nanotechnology of the ascendant dead, and of the other stars that had been reached by the newer, faster, more powerful descendants of St. Judy's Comet had ended nineteen hundred years of solitude and brought the first, lost colony of Orc into the visionary community of the star-crossing Dead. Long before your emergence, Sol thought, looking at the crease of Lenya's groin as she squatted on the pebbles to converse with the Blue Mana man. Emergence. A deeper, older word shadowed that expression; a word obsolete in the universe of the dead. Birth. No one had ever been born on Orc. No one had ever known childhood, or grown up. No one aged, no one died. They emerged. They stepped from the labia of the gestatory, fully formed, like gods. Sol knew the word child, but realized with a shock that he could not see it any more. It was blank, void. So many things decreated in this world he had engineered! By sea and by air. A trading of elements. Sol Gursky's skiff was completed as the Blue Mana's tectors transformed his blubber into a flying machine. Sol watched it spin into the air and recede to the south as the boat dipped through the chop toward the island of memory. We live forever, we transform ourselves, we transform worlds, solar systems, we ship across interstellar space, we defy time and deny death, but the one thing we cannot recreate is memory, he thought. Sea

birds dipped in the skiff's wake, hungry, hoping. Things cast up by motion. We cannot rebuild our memories, so we must store them, when our lives grow so full that they slop over the sides and evaporate. We Five Hundred Fathers have deep and much-emptied memories. Sol's island was a rock slab tilted out of the equatorial sea, a handful of hard hectares. Twisted repro olives and cypresses screened a small Doric temple at the highest point. Good maintenance tectors had held it strong against the Earth storms. The classical theming now embarrassed Sol, but enchanted Lenya. She danced beneath the olive branches, under the porticoes, across the lintels. Sol saw her again as he had that first night in the Small-year-ending ring dance at Old Red Ridge. Old lust. New hurt. In the sunlit central chamber, Lenya touched the reliefs of the life of Solomon Gursky. They would not yield their memories to her fingers, but they communicated in less sophisticated ways. "This woman." She had stopped in front of a pale stone carving of Solomon Gursky and a tall, ascetic-faced woman with close-cropped hair standing hand in hand before a tall, ghastly tower. "I loved her. She died in the battle of St. Judy's Comet. Big dead." *** Lost. "So is it only because I remind you of her?" He touched the carving. Memory bright and sharp as pain arced along his nerves; mnemotectors downloading into his aura. Elena. And a memory of orbit; the Long March ended, the object formerly known as St. Judy's Comet spun out into a web of beams and girders and habitation pods hurtling across the frosted red dustscapes of Orc. A web ripe with hanging fruit; entry pods ready to drop and spray the new world with life seed. Tectoforming. Among the fruit, seeds of the Five Hundred Fathers, founders of all the races of Orc. Among them, the Hidden Design and Solomon Gursky, four-armed, vacuum-proofed, avatar of life and death, clinging to a beam with the storms of Urizen behind him, touching his transforming sur-arms to the main memory of the mother seed. Remember her. Remember Elena. And sometime— soon, late— bring her back. Imprint her with an affinity for his scent, so that wherever she is, whoever she is with, she will come to me. He saw himself scuttling like a guilty spider across the web as the pods dropped Orc-ward. He saw himself in this place with Urizen's moons at syzygy, touching his hands to the carving, giving to it what it now returned to him, because he knew that as long as it was Lenya who reminded him of Elena, it could pretend to be honest. But the knowledge killed it. Lenya was more than a reminder. Lenya as Elena. Lenya was a simulacrum, empty, fake. Her life, her joy, her sorrow, her love— all deceit. He had never expected that she would come back to him at the end of the world. They should have had thousands of years. The world gave them days. He could not look at her as he moved from relief to relief, charging his aura with memory. He could not touch her as they waited on the shingle for the skiff to reconfigure into the flyer that would take them to the Heaven Tree. On the high point of the slab island, the Temple of Memory dissolved like rotting

fungus. He did not attempt sex with her as the flyer passed over the shattered landscapes of Thel and the burned forests of Chrysoberyl as they would have, before. She did not understand. She imagined she had hurt him somehow. She had, but the blame was Sol's. He could not tell her why he had suddenly expelled himself from her warmth. He knew that he should, that he must, but he could not. He changed his skin-speech to passive, mute, and reflected that much cowardice could be learned in five hundred long-years. They came with the evening to the Skyplain plateau from which the Heaven Tree rose, an adamantine black ray aimed at the eye of Urizen. As far as they could see, the plain twinkled with the lights and fires of vehicles and camps. Warmsight showed a million glowings: all the peoples of Orc, save those who had chosen to go into the earth, had gathered in this final redoubt. Seismic stabilizing tectors woven into the moho held steady the quakes that had shattered all other lands, but temblors of increasing violence warned that they could not endure much longer. At the end, Skyplain would crack like an egg, the Heaven Tree snap and recoil spaceward like a severed nerve. Sol's Five Hundred Father ident pulled his flyer out of the wheel of aircraft, airships, and aerial humans circling the stalk of the Heaven Tree into a priority slot on an ascender. The flyer caught the shuttle at five kilometers: a sudden veer toward the slab sides of the space elevator, guidance matching velocities with the accelerating ascender; then the drop, heart-stopping even for immortals, and the lurch as the flyer seized the docking nipple with its claspers and clung like a tick. Then the long climb heavenward. Emerging from high altitude cloud, Sol saw the hard white diamond of Ulro rise above the curve of the world. Too small yet to show a disc, but this barren rock searing under heavy CO2 exerted forces powerful enough to kick a moon into interstellar space. Looking up through the transparent canopy, he saw the Heaven Tree spread its delicate, light-studded branches hundreds of kilometers across the face of Urizen. Sol Gursky broke his silence. "Do you know what you'll do yet?" "Well, since I am here, I am not going into the ground. And the ice fleet scares me. I think of centuries dead, a tector frozen in ice. It seems like death." "It is death," Sol said. "Then you'll go to Urizen." "It's a change of outward form, that's all. Another way of being human. And there'll be continuity; that's important to me." He imagined the arrival: the ever-strengthening tug of gravity spiraling the flocks of vacuum-hardened carapaces inward; the flickers of withspeech between them, anticipation, excitement, fear as they grazed the edge of the atmosphere and felt ion flames lick their diamond skins. Lenya, falling, burning with the fires of entry as she cut a glowing trail across half a planet. The heat-shell breaking away as she unfurled her wings in the eternal shriek of wind and the ram-jets in her sterile womb kindled and roared. "And you?" she asked. Her skin said gentle. Confused as much by his breaking of it as by his silence, but gentle. "I have something planned," was all he said, but because that plan meant they would never meet again, he told her then what he had learned in the Temple of Memory. He tried to be kind and understanding, but it

was still a bastard thing to do, and she cried in the nest in the rear of the flyer all the way out of the atmosphere, half-way to heaven. It was a bastard thing and as he watched the stars brighten beyond the canopy, he could not say why he had done it, except that it was necessary to kill some things Big Dead so that they could never come back again. She cried now, and her skin was so dark it would not speak to him, but when she flew, it would be without any lingering love or regret for a man called Solomon Gursky. It is good to be hated, he thought, as the Heaven Tree took him up into its starlit branches. *** The launch laser was off, the reaction mass tanks were dry. Solomon Gursky fell outward from the sun. Urizen and its children were far beneath him. His course lay out of the ecliptic, flying north. His aft eyes made out a new pale ring orbiting the gas world, glowing in the low warmsight: the millions of adapted waiting in orbit for their turns to make the searing descent into a new life. She would be with them now. He had watched her go into the seed and be taken apart by her own elementals. He had watched the seed split and expel her into space, transformed, and burn her few kilos of reaction mass on the transfer orbit to Urizen. Only then had he felt free to undergo his own transfiguration. Life swarm. Mighty. So nearly right, so utterly wrong. She had almost sung when she spoke of the freedom of endless flight in the clouds of Urizen, but she would never fly freer than she did now, naked to space, the galaxy before her. The freedom of Urizen was a lie, the price exacted by its gravity and pressure. She had trapped herself in atmosphere and gravity. Urizen was another world. The parasitic man of the Ash nation had buried himself in a world. The aquatic Blue Mana, after long sleep in ice, would only give rise to another copy of the standard model. Worlds upon worlds. Infinite ways of being human, Solomon Gursky thought, outbound from the sun. He could feel the gentle stroke of the solar wind over the harsh dermal prickle of Urizen's magnetosphere. Sun arising. Almost time. Many ways of being Solomon Gursky, he thought, contemplating his new body. His analogy was with a conifer. He was a redwood cone fallen from the Heaven Tree, ripe with seeds. Each seed a Solomon Gursky, a world in embryo. The touch of the sun, that was what had opened those seed cones on that other world, long ago. Timing was too important to be left to higher cognitions. Subsystems had all the launch vectors programmed; he merely registered the growing strength of the wind from Los on his skin and felt himself begin to open. Solomon Gursky unfolded into a thousand scales. As the seeds exploded onto their preset courses, he burned to the highest orgasm of his memory before his persona downloaded into the final spore and ejected from the empty, dead carrier body. At five hundred kilometers, the seeds unfurled their solar sails. The breaking wave of particles, with multiple gravity assists from Luvah and Enitharmon, would surf the bright flotilla up to interstellar velocities, as, at the end of the centuries— millennia— long flights, the light-sails would brake the packages at their destinations.

He did not know what his many selves would find there. He had not picked targets for their resemblance to what he was leaving behind. That would be just another trap. He sensed his brothers shutting down their cognitive centers for the big sleep, like stars going out, one by one. A handful of seeds scattered, some to wither, some to grow. Who can say what he will find, except that it will be extraordinary. Surprise me! Solomon Gursky demanded of the universe, as he fell into the darkness between suns. SATURDAY The object was one point three astronomical units on a side, and at its current 10 percent C would arrive in thirty-five hours. On his chaise lounge by the Neptune fountain, Solomon Gursky finally settled on a name for the thing. He had given much thought, over many high-hours and in many languages, most of them nonverbal, to what he should call the looming object. The name that pleased him most was in a language dead (he assumed) for thirty million years. Aea. Acronym: Alien Enigmatic Artifact. Enigmatic Alien Artifact would have been more correct but the long dead language did not handle diphthongs well. Shadows fell over the gardens of Versailles, huge and soft as clouds. A forest was crossing the sun; a small one, little more than a copse, he thought, still finding delight in the notions that could be expressed in this dead language. He watched the spherical trees pass overhead, each a kilometer across (another archaism), enjoying the pleasurable play of shade and warmth on his skin. Sensual joys of incarnation. As ever when the forests migrated along the Bauble's jet streams, a frenzy of siphons squabbled in their wake, voraciously feeding off the stew of bacteria and complex fullerenes. Solomon Gursky darkened his eyes against the hard glare of the dwarf white sun. From Versailles' perspective in the equatorial plane, the Spirit Ring was a barely discernible filigree necklace draped around its primary. Perspective. Am I the emanation of it, or is it the emanation of me? Perspective: you worry about such things with a skeletal tetrahedron one point three astronomical units on a side fast approaching? Of course. I am some kind of human. "Show me," Solomon Gursky said. Sensing his intent, for Versailles was part of his intent, as everything that lived and moved within the Bauble was his intent, the disc of tectofactured baroque France began to tilt away from the sun. The sollilies on which Versailles and its gardens rested generated their own gravity fields; Solomon Gursky saw the tiny, bright sun seem to curve down behind the Petit Trianon, and thought, I have reinvented sunset. And, as the dark vault above him lit with stars, Night is looking out from the shadow of myself. The stars slowed and locked over the chimneys of Versailles. Sol had hoped to be able to see the object with the unaided eye, but in low-time he had forgotten the limitations of the primeval human form. A grimace of irritation, and it was the work of moments for the tectors to reconfigure his vision. Successive magnifications clicked up until ghostly, twinkling threads of light resolved out of the star field, like the drawings of gods and myths the ancients had laid on the comfortable heavens around the Alpha Point. Another click and the thing materialized.

Solomon Gursky's breath caught. Midway between the micro and the macro, it was humanity's natural condition that a man standing looking out into the dark should feel dwarfed. That need to assert one's individuality to the bigness underlies all humanity's outward endeavors. But the catch in the breath is more than doubled when a star seems dwarfed. Through the Spirit Ring, Sol had the dimensions, the masses, the vectors. The whole of the Bauble could be easily contained within Aea's vertices. A cabalistic sign. A cosmic eye in the pyramid. A chill contraction in the man Solomon Gursky's loins. How many million years since he had last felt his balls tighten with fear? One point three AU's on a side. Eight sextillion tons of matter. Point one C. The thing should have heralded itself over most of the cluster. Even in low-time, he should have had more time to prepare. But there had been no warning. At once, it was: a fading hexagram of gravitometric disturbances on his out-system sensors. Sol had reacted at once, but in those few seconds of stretched low-time that it took to conceive and create this Louis Quattorze conceit, the object had covered two-thirds of the distance from its emergence point. The high-time of created things gave him perspective. Bear you grapes or poison? Solomon Gursky asked the thing in the sky. It had not spoken, it had remained silent through all attempts to communicate with it, but it surely bore some gift. The manner of its arrival had only one explanation: the thing manipulated worm-holes. None of the civilization/citizens of the Reach— most of the western hemisphere of the galaxy— had evolved a nanotechnology that could reconfigure the continuum itself. None of the civilization/citizens of the Reach, and those federations of world-societies it fringed, had ever encountered a species that could not be sourced to the Alpha Point: that semi-legendary racial big bang from which PanHumanity had exploded into the universe. Four hundred billion stars in this galaxy alone, Solomon Gursky thought. We have not seeded even half of them. The trick we play with time, slowing our perceptions until our light-speed communications seem instantaneous and the journeys of our C-fractional ships are no longer than the sea-voyages of this era I have reconstructed, seduce us into believing that the universe is as close and companionable as a lover's body, and as familiar. The five million years between the MonoHumanity of the Alpha Point and the PanHumanity of the Great Leap Outward, is a catch of breath, a contemplative pause in our conversation with ourselves. Thirty million years I have evolved the web of life in this unique system: there is abundant time and space for true aliens to have caught us up, to have already surpassed us. Again, that tightening of the scrotum. Sol Gursky willed Versailles back toward the eye of the sun, but intellectual chill had invaded his soul. The orchestra of Lully made fete galante in the Hall of Mirrors for his pleasure, but the sound in his head of the destroying, rushing alien mass shrieked louder. As the solar parasol slipped between Versailles and the sun and he settled in twilight among the soft, powdered breasts of the ladies of the bed-chamber, he knew fear for the first time in thirty million years. And he dreamed. The dream took the shape of a memory, recontextualized, reconfigured, resurrected. He dreamed that he was a starship wakened from fifty thousand years of death by the warmth of a new sun on his solar sail. He dreamed that in the vast sleep the star toward which he had aimed himself spastically novaed. It kicked off its photosphere in a nebula of radiant gas but the explosion was underpowered; the carbon/hydrogen/nitrogen/oxygen plasma was drawn by gravity into a bubble of hydrocarbons around the star. An aura. A bright bauble. In Solomon Gursky's dream, an angel floated

effortlessly on tectoplastic wings hundreds of kilometers wide, banking and soaring on the chemical thermals, sowing seeds from its long, trailing fingertips. For a hundred years, the angel swam around the sun, sowing, nurturing, tending the strange shoots that grew from its fingers; things half-living, half-machine. Asleep among the powdered breasts of court women, Sol Gursky turned and murmured the word, "evolution." Solomon Gursky would only be a God he could believe in: the philosophers' God, creator but not sustainer, ineffable; too street-smart to poke its omnipotence into the smelly stuff of living. He saw his free-fall trees of green, the vast red rafts of the wind-reefs rippling in the solar breezes. He saw the blimps and medusas, the unresting open maws of the air-plankton feeders, the needle-thin jet-powered darts of the harpoon hunters. He saw an ecology spin itself out of gas and energy in thirty million yearless years, he saw intelligence flourish and seed itself to the stars, and fade into senescence; all in the blink of a low-time eye. "Evolution," he muttered again and the constructed women who did not understand sleep looked at each other. In the unfolding dream, Sol Gursky saw the Spirit Ring and the ships that came and went between the nearer systems. He heard the subaural babble of interstellar chatter, like conspirators in another room. He beheld this blur of life, evolving, transmuting, and he knew that it was very good. He said to himself, what a wonderful world, and feared for it. He awoke. It was morning, as it always was in Sol's Bauble. He worked off his testosterone high and tipped Versailles's darkside to look at the shadow of his nightmares. Any afterglow of libido was immediately extinguished. At eighteen light-hours distance, the astronomical dimensions assumed emotional force. A ribbon of mottled blue-green ran down the inner surface of each of Aea's six legs. Amplified vision resolved forested continents and oceans beneath fractal cloud curls. Each ribbon-world was the width of two Alpha Points peeled and ironed, stretched one point three astronomical units long. Sol Gursky was glad that this incarnation could not instantly access how many million planets' surfaces that equaled; how many hundreds of thousands of years it would take to walk from one vertex to another, and then to find, dumbfounded like the ancient conquistadors beholding a new ocean, another millennia-deep world in front of him. Solomon Gursky turned Versailles toward the sun. He squinted through the haze of the Bauble for the delicate strands of the Spirit Ring. A beat of his mind shifted his perceptions back into low-time, the only time frame in which he could withspeak to the Spirit Ring, his originating self. Self-reference, self-confession. No communication? None, spoke the Spirit Ring. Is it alien? Should I be afraid? Should I destroy the Bauble? In another time, such schizophrenia would have been disease. Can it annihilate you?

In answer, Sol envisioned the great tetrahedron at the bracelet of information tectors orbiting the sun. Then that is nothing, the Spirit Ring withsaid. And nothing is nothing to fear. Can it cause you pain or humiliation, or anguish to body or soul? Again, Sol withspoke an image, of cloud-shaded lands raised over each other like the pillars of Yahweh, emotionally shaded to suggest amazement that such an investment of matter and thought should have been created purely to humiliate Solomon Gursky. Then that too is settled. And whether it is alien, can it be any more alien to you than you yourself are to what you once were? All PanHumanity is alien to itself; therefore, we have nothing to fear. We shall welcome our visitor, we have many questions for it. Not the least being, why me? Solomon Gursky thought privately, silently, in the dome of his own skull. He shifted out of the low-time of the Spirit Ring to find that in those few subjective moments of communication Aea had passed the threshold of the Bauble. The leading edge of the tetrahedron was three hours away. An hour and half beyond that was the hub of Aea. "Since it seems that we can neither prevent nor hasten the object's arrival, nor guess its purposes until it deigns to communicate with us," Sol Gursky told his women of the bedchamber, "therefore let us party." Which they did, before the Mirror Pond, as Lully's orchestra played and capons roasted over charcoal pits, and torch-lit harlequins capered and fought out the ancient loves and comedies, and women splashed naked in the Triton Fountain, and fantastic lands one hundred million kilometers long slid past them. Aea advanced until Sol's star was at its center, then stopped. Abruptly, instantly. A small gravitational shiver troubled Versailles, the orchestra missed a note, a juggler dropped a club, the water in the fountain wavered, women shrieked, a capon fell from a spit into the fire. That was all. The control of mass, momentum, and gravity was absolute. The orchestra leader looked at Solomon Gursky, staff raised to resume the beat. Sol Gursky did not raise the handkerchief. The closest section of Aea was fifteen degrees east, two hundred thousand kilometers out. To Sol Gursky, it was two fingers of sun-lit land, tapering infinitesimally at either end to threads of light. He looked up at the apex, two other brilliant threads spun down beneath the horizon, one behind the Petit Trianon, the other below the roof of the Chapel Royal. The conductor was still waiting. Instruments pressed to faces, the musicians watched for the cue. Peacocks shrieked on the lawn. Sol Gursky remembered how irritating the voices of peacocks were, and wished he had not recreated them. Sol Gursky waved the handkerchief. A column of white light blazed out of the gravel walk at the top of the steps. The air was a seethe of glowing motes. An attempt is being made to communicate with us, the Spirit Ring said in a flicker of low-time. Sol Gursky felt information from the Ring crammed into his cerebral cortex: the beam originated from a source of the rim section of the closest section of the artifact. The tectors that created and sustained the Bauble were being reprogrammed. At hyper-velocities, they were manufacturing a construct out of the Earth of Versailles.

The pillar of light dissipated. A human figure stood at the top of the steps: a white Alpha Point male, dressed in Louis XIV style. The man descended the steps into the light of the flambeau bearers. Sol Gursky looked on his face. Sol Gursky burst into laughter. "You are very welcome," he said to his doppelgänger. "Will you join us? The capons will be ready shortly, we can bring you the finest wines available to humanity, and I'm sure the waters of the fountains would be most refreshing to one who has traveled so long and so far." "Thank you," Solomon Gursky said in Solomon Gursky's voice. "It's good to find a hospitable reception after a strange journey." Sol Gursky nodded to the conductor, who raised his staff, and the petite bande resumed their interrupted gavotte. Later, on a stone bench by the lake, Sol Gursky said to his doppel, "Your politeness is appreciated, but it really wasn't necessary for you to don my shape. All this is as much a construction as you are." "Why do you think it's a politeness?" the construct said. "Why should you choose to wear the shape of Solomon Gursky?" "Why should I not, if it is my own shape?" Nereids splashed in the pool, breaking the long reflections of Aea. "I often wonder how far I reach," Sol said. "Further than you can imagine," Sol II answered. The playing Nereids dived; ripples spread across the pond. The visitor watched the wavelets lap against the stone rim and interfere with each other. "There are others out there, others we never imagined, moving through the dark, very slowly, very silently. I think they may be older than us. They are different from us, very different, and we have now come to the complex plane where our expansions meet." "There was a strong probability that they— you— were an alien artifact." "I am, and I'm not. I am fully Solomon Gursky, and fully Other. That's the purpose behind this artifact; that we have reached a point where we either compete, destructively, or join." "Seemed a long way to come just for a family reunion," Solomon Gursky joked. He saw that the doppel laughed, and how it laughed, and why it laughed. He got up from the stone rim of the Nereid pool. "Come with me, talk to me, we have thirty million years of catching up." His brother fell in at his side as they walked away from the still water toward the Aea-lit woods. His story: he had fallen longer than any other seed cast off by the death of Orc. Eight hundred thousand years between wakings, and as he felt the warmth of a new sun seduce his tector systems to the work of transformation, his sensors reported that his was not the sole presence in the system. The brown dwarf toward which he decelerated was being dismantled and converted into an englobement of space habitats.

"Their technology is similar to ours— I think it must be a universal inevitability— but they broke the ties that still bind us to planets long ago," Sol II said. The woods of Versailles were momentarily darkened as a sky-reef eclipsed Aea. "This is why I think they are older than us: I have never seen their original form— they have no tie to it, we still do; I suspect they no longer remember it. It wasn't until we fully merged that I was certain that they were not another variant of humanity." A hand-cranked wooden carousel stood in a small clearing. The faces of the painted horses were fierce and pathetic in the sky light. Wooden rings hung from iron gibbets around the rim of the carousel; the wooden lances with which the knights hooked down their favors had been gathered in and locked in a closet in the middle of the merry-go-round. "We endure forever, we engender races, nations, whole ecologies, but we are sterile," the second Sol said. "We inbreed with ourselves. There is no union of disparities, no coming together, no hybrid energy. With the Others, it was sex. Intercourse. Out of the fusion of ideas and visions and capabilities, we birthed what you see." The first Sol Gursky laid his hand on the neck of a painted horse. The carousel was well balanced, the slightest pressure set it turning. "Why are you here, Sol?" he asked. "We shared technologies, we learned how to engineer on the quantum level so that field effects can be applied on macroscopic scales. Manipulation of gravity and inertia; non-locality; we can engineer and control quantum worm-holes." "Why have you come, Sol?" "Engineering of alternative time streams; designing and colonizing multiple worlds, hyperspace and hyperdimensional processors. There are more universes than this one for us to explore." The wooden horse stopped. "What do you want, Sol?" "Join us," said the other Solomon Gursky. "You always had the vision— we always had the vision, we Solomon Gurskys. Humanity expanding into every possible ecological niche." "Absorption," Solomon Gursky said. "Assimilation." "Unity," said his brother. "Marriage. Love. Nothing is lost, everything is gained. All you have created here will be stored; that is what I am, a machine for remembering. It's not annihilation, Sol, don't fear it; it's not your self-hood dissolving into some identityless collective. It is you, plus. It is life, cubed. And ultimately, we are one seed, you and I, unnaturally separated. We gain each other." If nothing is lost, then you remember what I am remembering, Solomon Gursky I thought. I am remembering a face forgotten for over thirty million years: Rabbi Bertelsmann. A fat, fair, pleasant face. He is talking to his Bar Mitzvah class about God and masturbation. He is saying that God condemned Onan not for the pleasure of his vice, but because he spilled his seed on the ground. He was fruitless, sterile. He kept the gift of life to himself. And I am now God in my own world, and Rabbi B is smiling

and saying, masturbation, Sol. It is all just one big jerkoff, seed spilled on the ground, engendering nothing. Pure recreation; recreating yourself endlessly into the future. He looked at his twin. "Rabbi Bertelsmann?" Sol Gursky II said. "Yes," Sol Gursky I said; then, emphatically, certainly, "Yes!" Solomon Gursky II's smile dissolved into motes of light. All at once, the outer edges of the great tetrahedron kindled with ten million points of diamond light. Sol watched the white beams sweep through the Bauble and understood what it meant, that they could manipulate time and space. Even at light-speed, Aea was too huge for each such simultaneity. Air trees, sky reefs, harpooners, siphons, blimps, zeps, cloud sharks: everything touched by the moving beams was analyzed, comprehended, stored. Recording angels, Sol Gursky thought, as the silver knives dissected his world. He saw the Spirit Ring unravel like coils of DNA as a billion days of Solomon Gursky flooded up the ladder of light into Aea. The center no longer held; the gravitational forces the Spirit Ring had controlled, that had maintained the ecosphere of the Bauble, were failing. Sol's world was dying. He felt pain, no sorrow, no regret, but rather a savage joy, an urgent desire to be up and on and out, to be free of this great weight of life and gravity. It is not dying, he thought. Nothing ever dies. He looked up. An angel-beam scored a searing arc across the rooftops of Versailles. He opened his arms to it and was taken apart by the light. Everything is held and recreated in the mind of God. Unremembered by the mind of Solomon Gursky, Versailles disintegrated into swarms of free-flying tectors. The end came quickly. The angels reached into the photosphere of the star and the complex quasi-information machines that worked there. The sun grew restless, woken from its long quietude. The Spirit Ring collapsed. Fragments spun end-over-end through the Bauble, tearing spectacularly through the dying sky-reefs, shattering cloud forests, blazing in brief glory in funeral orbits around the swelling sun. For the sun was dying. Plagues of sunspots pocked its chromosphere; solar storms raced from pole to pole in million-kilometer tsunamis. Panicked hunter packs kindled and died in the solar protuberances hurled off as the photosphere prominenced to the very edge of the Bauble. The sun bulged and swelled like a painfully infected pregnancy: Aea was manipulating fundamental forces, loosening the bonds of gravity that held the system together. At the end, it would require all the energies of star-death to power the quantum worm-hole processors. The star was now a screaming saucer of gas. No living thing remained in the Bauble. All was held in the mind of Aea. The star burst. The energies of the nova should have boiled Aea's oceans, seared its lands from their beds. It should have twisted and snapped the long, thin arms like yarrow stalks, sent the artifact tumbling like a smashed Fabergé egg through space. But Aea had woven its defenses strong: gravity fields warped the electromagnetic radiation around the fragile terrains; the quantum processors devoured the storm of charged particles, and reconfigured space, time, mass. The four corners of Aea burned brighter than the dying sun for an instant. And it was gone; under space

and time, to worlds and adventures and experiences beyond all saying. SUNDAY Toward the end of the universe, Solomon Gursky's thoughts turned increasingly to lost loves. Had it been entirely physical, Ua would have been the largest object in the universe. Only its fronds, the twenty-light-year-long stalactites that grew into the ylem, tapping the energies of decreation, had any material element. Most of Ua, ninety-nine followed by several volumes of decimal nines percent of its structure, was folded through eleven-space. It was the largest object in the universe in that its fifth and sixth dimensional forms contained the inchoate energy flux known as the universe. Its higher dimensions contained only itself, several times over. It was infundibular. It was vast, it contained multitudes. PanLife, that amorphous, multi-faceted cosmic infection of human, transhuman, non-human, PanHuman sentiences, had filled the universe long before the continuum reached its elastic limit and began to contract under the weight of dark matter and heavy neutrinos. Femtotech, hand in hand with the worm-hole jump, spread PanLife across the galactic super-clusters in a blink of God's eye. There was no humanity, no alien. No us, no other. There was only life. The dead had become life. Life had become Ua: Pan-spermia. Ua woke to consciousness, and like Alexander the Great, despaired when it had no new worlds to conquer. The universe had grown old in Ua's gestation; it had withered, it contracted, it drew in on itself. The red shift of galaxies had turned blue. And Ua, which owned the attributes, abilities, ambitions, everything except the name and pettinesses of a god, found itself, like an old, long-dead God from a world slagged by its expanding sun millions of years ago, in the business of resurrection. The galaxies raced together, gravitational forces tearing them into loops and whorls of severed stars. The massive black holes at the galactic centers, fueled by billennia of star-death, coalesced and merged into monstrosities that swallowed globular clusters whole, that shredded galaxies and drew them spiraling inward until, at the edge of the Schwartzchild radii, they radiated super-hard gamma. Long since woven into higher dimensions, Ua fed from the colossal power of the accretion discs, recording in multidimensional matrices the lives of the trillions of sentient organisms fleeing up its fronds from the destruction. All things are held in the mind of God: at the end, when the universal background radiation rose asymptotically to the energy density of the first seconds of the Big Bang, it would deliver enough power for the femtoprocessors woven through the Eleven Heavens to rebuild the universe, entire. A new heaven, and a new Earth. In the trans-temporal matrices of Ua, PanLife flowed across dimensions, dripping from the tips of the fronds into bodies sculpted to thrive in the plasma flux of ragnarok. Tourists to the end of the world: most wore the shapes of winged creatures of fire, thousands of kilometers across. Starbirds. Firebirds. But the being formerly known as Solomon Gursky had chosen a different form, an archaism from that long-vanished planet. It pleased him to be a thousand-kilometer, diamond-skinned Statue of Liberty, torch out-held, beaming a way through the torrents of star-stuff. Sol Gursky flashed between flocks of glowing soul-birds clustering in the information-rich environment around the frond-tips. He felt their curiosity, their appreciation, their consternation at his non-conformity; none got the joke. Lost loves. So many lives, so many worlds, so many shapes and bodies, so many loves. They had been wrong, those ones back at the start, who had said that love did not survive death. He had been wrong. It

was eternity that killed love. Love was a thing measured by human lifetimes. Immortality gave it time enough, and space, to change, to become things more than love, or dangerously other. None endured. None would endure. Immortality was endless change. Toward the end of the universe, Solomon Gursky realized that what made love live forever was death. All things were held in Ua, awaiting resurrection when time, space, and energy fused and ceased to be. Most painful among Sol's stored memories was the remembrance of a red-yellow tiger-striped angel fighter, half-crucified, crippled, tumbling toward the star clouds of Virgo. Sol had searched the trillions of souls roosting in Ua for Elena; failing, he hunted for any that might have touched her, hold some memory of her. He found none. As the universe contracted— as fast and inevitable as a long-forgotten season in the ultra-low time of Ua— Sol Gursky entertained hopes that the universal gathering would draw her in. Cruel truths pecked at his perceptions: calculations of molecular deliquescence, abrasion by interstellar dust clouds, probabilities of stellar impacts, the slow terminal whine of proton decay; any of which denied that Elena could still exist. Sol refused those truths. A thousand-kilometer Statue of Liberty searched the dwindling cosmos for one glimpse of red-yellow tiger-stripes embedded in a feather of fractal plasma flame. And now a glow of recognition had impinged on his senses laced through the Eleven Heavens. Her. It had to be her. Sol Gursky flew to an eye of gravitational stability in the flux and activated the worm-hole nodes seeded throughout his diamond skin. Space opened and folded like an exercise in origami. Sol Gursky went elsewhere. The starbird grazed the energy-dense borderlands of the central accretion disc. It was immense. Sol's Statue of Liberty was a frond of one of its thousand flight feathers, but it sensed him, welcomed him, folded its wings around him as it drew him to the shifting pattern of sun-spots that was the soul of its being. He knew these patterns. He remembered these emotional flavors. He recalled this love. He tried to perceive if it were her, her journeys, her trials, her experiences, her agonies, her vastenings. Would she forgive him? The soul spots opened. Solomon Gursky was drawn inside. Clouds of tectors interpenetrated, exchanging, sharing, recording. Intellectual intercourse. He entered her adventures among alien species five times older than PanHumanity, an alliance of wills and powers waking a galaxy to life. In an earlier incarnation, he walked the worlds she had become, passed through the dynasties and races and species she had propagated. He made with her the long crossings between stars and clusters, clusters and galaxies. Earlier still, and he swam with her through the cloud canyons of a gas giant world called Urizen, and when that world was hugged too warmly by its sun, changed mode with her, embarked with her on the search for new places to live. In the nakedness of their communion, there was no hiding Sol Gursky's despair. I'm sorry Sol, the starbird once known as Lenya communicated.

You have nothing to sorry be for, Solomon Gursky said. I'm sorry that I'm not her. I'm sorry I never was her. I made you to be a lover, Sol withspoke. But you became something older, something richer, something we have lost. A daughter, Lenya said. Unmeasurable time passed in the blue shift at the end of the universe. Then Lenya asked, Where will you go? Finding her is the only unfinished business I have left, Sol said. Yes, the starbird communed. But we will not meet again. No, not in this universe. Nor any other. And that is death, eternal separation. My unending regret, Sol Gursky withspoke as Lenya opened her heart and the clouds of tectors separated. Goodbye, daughter. The Statue of Liberty disengaged from the body of the starbird. Lenya's quantum processors created a pool of gravitational calm in the maelstrom. Sol Gursky manipulated space and time and disappeared. He re-entered the continuum as close as he dared to a frond. A pulse of his mind brought him within reach of its dendrites. As they drew him in, another throb of thought dissolved the Statue of Liberty joke into the plasma flux. Solomon Gursky howled up the dendrite, through the frond, into the soul matrix of Ua. There he carved a niche in the eleventh and highest heaven, and from deep under time, watched the universe end. As he had expected, it ended in fire and light and glory. He saw space and time curve inward beyond the limit of the Planck dimensions; he felt the energy gradients climb toward infinity as the universe approached the zero point from which it had spontaneously emerged. He felt the universal processors sown through eleven dimensions seize that energy before it faded, and put it to work. It was a surge, a spurt of power and passion, like the memory of orgasm buried deep in the chain of memory that was the days of Solomon Gursky. Light to power, power to memory, memory to flesh. Ua's stored memories, the history of every particle in the former universe, were woven into being. Smart superstrings rolled balls of wrapped eleven-space like sacred scarabs wheeling dung. Space, time, mass, energy unraveled; as the universe died in a quantum fluctuation, it was reborn in primal light. To Solomon Gursky, waiting in low-time where aeons were breaths, it seemed like creation by fiat. A brief, bright light, and galaxies, clusters, stars, turned wholeformed and living within his contemplation. Already personas were swarming out of Ua's honeycomb cells into time and incarnation, but what had been reborn was not a universe, but universes. The re-resurrected were not condemned to blindly recapitulate their former lives. Each choice and action that diverged from the original pattern splintered off a separate universe. Sol and Lenya had spoken truly when they had said they would never meet again. Sol's point of entry into the new polyverse was a thousand years before Lenya's; the universe he intended to create would never intersect with hers.

The elder races had already fanned the polyverse into a mille feuille of alternatives: Sol carefully tracked his own timeline through the blur of possibilities as the first humans dropped back into their planet's past. Stars moving into remembered constellations warned Sol that his emergence was only a few hundreds of thousands of years off. He moved down through dimensional matrices, at each level drawing closer to the time flow of his particular universe. Solomon Gursky hung over the spinning planet. Civilizations rose and decayed, empires conquered and crumbled. New technologies, new continents, new nations were discovered. All the time, alternative Earths fluttered away like torn-off calendar pages on the wind as the dead created new universes to colonize. Close now. Mere moments. Sol dropped into meat time, and Ua expelled him like a drop of milk from a swollen breast. Solomon Gursky fell. Illusions and anticipations accompanied his return to flesh. Imaginings of light; a contrail angel scoring the nightward half of the planet on its flight across a dark ocean to a shore, to a mountain, to a valley, to a glow of campfire among night-blooming cacti. Longing. Desire. Fear. Gain, and loss. God's trade: to attain the heart's desire, you must give up everything you are. Even the memory. In the quilted bag by the fire in the sheltered valley under the perfume of the cactus flowers, the man called Solomon Gursky woke with a sudden chill start. It was night. It was dark. Desert stars had half-completed their compass above him. The stone-circled fire had burned down to clinking red glow: the night perfume witched him. Moths padded softly through the air, seeking nectar. Sol Gursky drank five senses full of his world. I am alive, he thought. I am here. Again. Ur-light burned in his hind-brain; memories of Ua, a power like omnipotence. Memories of a life that out-lived its native universe. Worlds, suns, shapes. Flashes, moments. Too heavy, too rich for this small knot of brain to hold. Too bright: no one can live with the memory of having been a god. It would fade— it was fading already. All he need hold— all he must hold— was what he needed to prevent this universe from following its predestined course. The realization that eyes were watching him was a shock. Elena sat on the edge of the fire shadow, knees folded to chin, arms folded over shins, looking at him. Sol had the feeling that she had been looking at him without him knowing for a long time, and the surprise, the uneasiness of knowing you are under the eyes of another, tempered both the still-new lust he felt for her, and his fading memories of aeons-old love. Déjà vu. But this moment had never happened before. The divergence was beginning. "Can't sleep?" she asked. "I had the strangest dream." "Tell me." The thing between them was at the stage where they searched each other's dreams for allusions to their love. "I dreamed that the world ended," Sol Gursky said. "It ended in light, and the light was like the light in a movie projector, that carried the image of the world and everything in it, and so the world was created

again, as it had been before." As he spoke, the words became true. It was a dream now. This life, this body, these memories, were the solid and faithful. "Like a Tipler machine," Elena said. "The idea that the energy released by the Big Crunch could power some kind of holographic recreation of the entire universe. I suppose with an advanced enough nanotechnology, you could rebuild the universe, an exact copy, atom for atom." Chill dread struck in Sol's belly. She could not know, surely. She must not know. "What would be the point of doing it exactly the same all over again?" "Yeah." Elena rested her cheek on her knee. "But the question is, is this our first time in the world, or have we been here many times before, each a little bit different? Is this the first universe, or do we only think that it is?" Sol Gursky looked into the embers, then to the stars. "The Nez Perce Nation believes that the world ended on the third day and that what we are living in are the dreams of the second night." Memories, fading like summer meteors high overhead, told Sol that he had said this once before, in their future, after his first death. He said it now in the hope that that future would not come to pass. Everything that was different, every tiny detail, pushed this universe away from the one in which he must lose her. A vee of tiger-striped tectoplastic tumbled end over end forever toward Virgo. He blinked the ghost away. It faded like all the others. They were going more quickly than he had thought. He would have to make sure of it now, before that memory too dissolved. He struggled out of the terrain bag, went over to the bike lying exhausted on the ground. By the light of a detached bicycle lamp, he checked the gear train. "What are you doing?" Elena asked from the fireside. The thing between them was still new, but Sol remembered that tone in her voice, that soft inquiry, from another lifetime. "Looking at the gears. Something didn't feel right about them today. They didn't feel solid." "You didn't mention it earlier." No, Sol thought. I didn't know about it. Not then. The gear teeth grinned flashlight back at him. "We've been giving them a pretty hard riding. I read in one of the biking mags that you can get metal fatigue. Gear train shears right through, just like that." "On brand-new, two thousand dollar bikes?" "On brand-new two thousand dollar bikes." "So what do you think you can do about it at one o'clock in the morning in the middle of the Sonora Desert?"

Again, that come-hither tone. Just a moment more, Elena. One last thing, and then it will be safe. "It just didn't sit right. I don't want to take it up over any more mountains until I've had it checked out. You get a gear-shear up there ..." "So, what are you saying, irritating man?" "I'm not happy about going over Blood of Christ Mountain tomorrow." "Yeah. Sure. Fine." "Maybe we should go out west, head for the coast. It's whale season, I always wanted to see whales. And there's real good seafood. There's this cantina where they have fifty ways of serving iguana." "Whales. Iguanas. Fine. Whatever you want. Now, since you're so wide-awake, you can just get your ass right over here, Sol Gursky!" She was standing up, and Sol saw and felt what she had been concealing by the way she had sat. She wearing only a cut-off MTB shirt. Safe, he thought, as he seized her and took her down laughing and yelling onto the camping mat. Even as he thought it, he forgot it, and all those Elenas who would not now be: conspirator, crop-haired freedom fighter, four-armed space-angel. Gone. The stars moved in their ordained arcs. The moths and cactus forest bats drifted through the soft dark air, and the eyes of the things that hunted them glittered in the firelight. Sol and Elena were still sore and laughing when the cactus flowers closed with dawn. They ate their breakfast and packed their small camp, and were in the saddle and on the trail before the sun was full over the shoulder of Blood of Christ Mountain. They took the western trail, away from the hills, and the town called Redención hidden among them with its freight of resurrected grief. They rode the long trail that led down to the ocean, and it was bright, clear endless Monday morning. The Cuckoo's Boys ROBERT REED Robert Reed sold his first story in 1986, and quickly established himself as a frequent contributor to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Asimov's Science Fiction, as well as selling many stories to Science Fiction Age, Universe, New Destinies, Tomorrow, Synergy, Starlight, and elsewhere. Reed may be one of the most prolific of today's young writers, particularly at short fiction lengths, seriously rivaled for that position only by authors such as Stephen Baxter and Brian Stableford. And— like Baxter and Stableford— he manages to keep up a very high standard of quality while being prolific, something that is not at all easy to do. Almost every year throughout the mid- to late nineties, he has produced at least two or three stories that would be good enough to get him into a Best of the Year anthology under ordinary circumstances, and some years he has produced four or five of them, so that often the choice is not whether to use a Reed story, but rather which Reed story to use— a remarkable accomplishment.

Nor was the situation any different in 1998, with at least five first-rate Robert Reed stories from which to choose. I finally settled on the remarkable novella that follows, one as current as today's headlines and yet as surprising as tomorrow always must be, a thought-provoking study that reexamines the old question of nature vs. nurture, with some disquieting results. Reed is almost as prolific as a novelist as he is as a short story writer, having produced eight novels to date, including The Leeshore, The Hormone Jungle, Black Milk, The Remarkables, Down the Bright Way, Beyond the Veil of Stars, An Exaltation of Larks, and, most recently, Beneath the Gated Sky. Just out is his long-overdue first collection, The Dragons of Springplace. His stories have appeared in our Ninth, Tenth, Eleventh, Twelfth, Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Annual Collections. He lives in Lincoln, Nebraska, where he's at work on a novel-length version of his 1997 novella, "Marrow." 1. Here's your first assignment: Build a starship. And I want you to tell me all about it. Its name. How big it is. What it is made from. Tell me about its power plant and engines. How many are in the crew, and what are their names? They deserve names. Are they human, and if not, what? Draw them for me, and draw your ship, too. Do you have weapons on board? If so, what kinds? You might want to carry some little scout ships along for the ride. Anything else that you might think is useful, I'll let you take. Plus there's one piece of gear that I'm putting on board. It's a box. A box about this big. Inside is a wormhole. Open its lid, and the wormhole swallows your ship, transporting it to somewhere else. You'll travel through space and through time. Or maybe you'll leave our universe entirely. There's no way to know what happens next. It's all up to me. My name's Houston Cross. Call me Mr. Cross, or Houston. I'm going to be your science mentor for the year. *** John was one of the first PS's born. He is 13 years old, and since he hasn't been skipped ahead in school, he's an eighth-grader. A growth spurt and a steady lack of exercise have made him larger than many adults. His kinky black hair is short. His coffee-colored skin has a boy's smoothness, still free of whiskers and hair on the forearms. His brown eyes are active, engaged. He smiles with a nervous eagerness, and sometimes, particularly when he's excited, he talks almost too quickly to be understood. "Thanks for taking me," he blurts. Then he adds, "Ms. Lindstrum says you've been doing this for a long time." Ms. Lindstrum is the school's Gifted Facilitator. "She says I'm lucky to have you." Houston shrugs and halfway laughs. "I wouldn't know about that."

"How long have you been a mentor?" John asks, saying it in one breath, as if the sentence were a single word. "Five years," Houston replies. "This is my sixth." "Have you ever worked with us?" "Eighth graders? Sure—" "No. I mean us. Or do you teach normals, usually?" Houston waits for a moment, then says, "I understood the first time." He shakes his head, telling the boy, "Please don't talk that way." "Oh. Sorry!" John is instantly angry with himself. It shows in the eyes and how the big hands wrestle with one another. "You know what I mean. Normal gifted kids." "Sure, John." "I'm not better than anyone else," he blurts with a robust conviction. "I don't ever let myself think that way." "Good." "And I try to get along. With everyone." "That's a good policy, John. Getting along." The boy sighs, his face suddenly very young and tired. He looks around the empty classroom, then gazes out the long window. A wide green lawn ends at a quiet street, shade pooling beneath tall pin oaks. "Can I start?" he asks. "Excuse me?" "With my starship. Can I, Mr. Cross?" "Be my guest." The Facilitator met with Houston yesterday. She warned him that John was an only child, and he lived with his divorced mother— a common circumstance among PS's. Perhaps that's why the boy suffered from feelings of guilt and loss and powerlessness. "But in the plus column," she added, "the mother is relatively well educated, and she seems to genuinely care about him. When she finds time." John holds his stylus in his left hand, head bent forward, using an electronic workpad for the rest of their hour. He stops only to say that his hand is sore. When the bell rings— an obnoxious, metallic clanging— he looks up in panic, exclaiming, "But I'm not done yet!" "Work at home tonight," Houston offers. "Or tomorrow. Here. We've got plenty of time, John."

The boy scrolls through page after page of sketches and hurried labels. Shaking his head in despair, he says, "This is all shit. I'm sorry about my language, Mr. Cross. But this is all just shit." "We'll try again tomorrow." But the boy isn't mollified. Folding his notebook, he says, "I get these ideas. All the time. But a lot of them...well, they're just stupid. You know? They're rancid! ..." The mentor smiles in a thin way. He says, "John," and pats the boy's left hand. He says, "Believe me. Everyone chews on that shit sandwich." *** Phillip Stevens was the only child of an African-American man and his German-American girlfriend. Phillip was labeled gifted before he was eight. He graduated from Princeton at 18, then dropped out of medical school two years later in order to form his own corporation. His first billion dollars were made before he was 26, most of it coming from the rapidly growing genetics industry. His later billions came from shrewd investments and several medi-technical advances in which he played a hands-on role. Following his 30th birthday, Phillip began pouring his wealth into a new research facility. To visitors and the press, he boasted that he would do nothing but cutting-edge research that would alleviate human misery. But close associates grew concerned with the real direction of their work, and to those malcontents, he said, "Here's six figures. Now quiet, or I'll have your nuts for lunch." Too late, the CDC believed the warnings about the billionaire's plans. Federal agents in bulky biosuits descended on Phillip's empire. But the criminal had already vanished, taking with him nearly 50 liters of growth media and an artificial microbe dubbed Phillip 23. *** Mike was one of the last PS's born. He has just skipped the sixth grade. No growth spurt has taken him, and judging by his wiry build, he's physically active. The face is narrower than John's, and two years younger, and something about it seems harder. He lives with parents of modest means. According to Ms. Lindstrum, the boy's genetics have little mutations. Which is normal among the last-born. "Maybe it's his genes," she warned Houston, "or maybe it's something else. Either way, Mike has a different attitude. You'll notice it right away." "How'd you get this job?" the boy asks. Flat out. "With bribes," Houston replies. Instantly. "No," says Mike, never blinking. "I bet they gave you some special test."

Houston laughs, admitting, "They asked a lot of questions. But I don't know if I'd call it a test." "When did this happen?" "When I started working in the schools." "How long have you been a teacher?" "A mentor." "Yeah. That." Mike has long hair— longer than any current fashion— and either through pharmaceutical tricks or the mutations, it's straighter and edging toward blond. The boy spends a lot of time pushing unruly locks out of his brown eyes. "You've been a mentor for a long time. Haven't you?" "Several years now." "But you didn't deal with us till now." He says it, then smiles with a slyness, happy to prove his special knowledge. "I've been asking about you." "You have been." "Shouldn't I have?" Houston waits for a moment, then asks, "Did you talk to John about me?" "God, no. Not that idiot." Houston says nothing. "No, there's some guys you used to teach. To mentor. Whatever." Mike names them— both boys are in high school now— then adds, "They thought you were pretty good. All things considered." "All things considered, that's good news." "They told me that you steered clear of us." Houston doesn't respond. "Why is that?" "You weren't old enough." He speaks calmly, without doubts. "I like working with middle-schoolers. Not children." The comment makes an impact. The boy almost smiles, then remembers his next question. "What did they ask?" "When?" "When you became a mentor. What kinds of questions did you get?"

"The interviewer wondered what I knew about gifted students. He asked what I would do in this situation, or that one. And he checked to see if I'd ever been arrested—" "Have you been?" "Five times," he says. Then he asks, "Do you believe that?" "No," the boy snorts. Then, "What about this year? Did they make you do anything special before you got us?" "Some things," Houston admits. "I had to read various books and some very boring reports. And I went through special in-depth training for an entire afternoon. I needed to be sensitized to your circumstances and special needs." "Oh, yeah? I've got special needs?" "Everyone does, Mike." "What else?" "I signed a contract. I'm never supposed to talk to the press. Ever." Houston's voice sharpens, just for that instant. Then he smiles, adding, "All questions are handled through the Special Task Office at district headquarters." Mike seems impressed with the answers or the precautions. Or perhaps both. Houston prods him. "Work on your starship. Okay?" Instead of a workpad, Mike has a fat spiral notebook and a pen leaking an unearthly green ink. With his left hand, he writes Day One on the first page. A moment's reflection leads to a little laugh, then a sly glimpse at his mentor. "Hey, Houston," he says. "Can I have an antimatter cannon?" "I don't know. What is an 'antimatter cannon'?" The boy rolls his brown eyes. "It's a cannon. It shoots balls of antimatter. They explode into pure energy when they hit anything." "Okay. But how would a weapon like that work?" "What do you mean?" "Is your ship built from antimatter?" Houston asks. "And the crew, too?" "That would be stupid," the boy assures him. "The first time we landed on another planet— boom." "But how do you keep your shells from destroying you?" Houston asks the question, then leans closer. "How do you manipulate something that you can't touch?" The boy thinks hard for a moment, then says, "Magnets."

"Okay." "We make cannonballs out of anti-iron," he says, "and we keep them in a vacuum, held there by a really powerful magnetic field." "Good enough," says Houston. Mike shakes his head, admitting, "Those guys I know ... they warned me. You can really be un-fun when you want to be." Houston says, "Good." The boy folds himself over his notebook, working with the same fevered intensity that John showed. But he doesn't complain about a sore hand, and while the sketches are sloppier than those on a workpad, he seems infinitely more pleased with the results. After the bell rings, Houston admits, "I'm curious. What do you want to do with that fancy cannon?" "Blow up planets," the boy says. Instantly. Then he looks up, wearing a devilish grin. "Is that okay with you, Houston?" "Sure," he says. "Why not?" *** The synthetic protozoan, Phillip 23, was a mild but durable pathogen carried by spit and the air. Healthy males and children rarely showed symptoms. The old and impaired developed flu-like infections, and at least a thousand died during the epidemic. But fertile women were the preferred hosts. The bug would invade the monthly egg, consume the mother's nucleus and mitochondria, then replace both with huge amounts of nuclear material. All races and all parts of the globe were struck by the disease. Victims included nuns and teenage virgins and at least one lady on death row. During the epidemic, some 3 percent of all conceptions on the planet were baby boys carrying Phillip Stevens' genetic code. *** "Your third mentee," Ms. Lindstrum began to say. Then she hesitated, contemplating her next words. They were sitting in the woman's tiny office. "The boy's name is Troy Andrew Holdenmeister. And I should warn you. His parents are utterly devoted

to him." Houston said, "Okay." The Facilitator was scrolling through reports and memos and test results of every complexion. With a mixture of professional distance and practiced scorn, she said, "The mother has dedicated her life to the boy. She has three other children, but it's Troy who gets most of her attentions." "I see." "She wants to meet with you. Tomorrow, if possible." Houston said nothing. "And there's something else you should know: Troy isn't quite like the other PS's. His scores are lower in the usual peak areas. Math and science, and so on." "Mutations?" Houston asked. She shrugged, as if to say, "We can hope." But she had to admit, "He's only five months younger than John. Mutations were rare then. And the differences ... well, it isn't likely that a few genes would change so much...." Ms. Lindstrum looked like someone who had been married once or twice, and always too soon. She was tall and a little heavy around the hips, and beneath a professional veneer was a puddle of doubts and fickle emotions. Houston recognized the symptoms. They showed in the lonely eyes and the way she always would watch his eyes. He sensed that if he wanted, he could gently take hold of one of her hands, say the usual nice words, and have her. Within the week, Ms. Lindstrum would be making breakfast for him, wearing nothing but her best apron, smiling in a giddy, lovesick way. Houston didn't reach for her hand. "Is Troy adopted?" he asked. Ms. Lindstrum shook her head. "I know someone who knows the family. Mrs. Holdenmeister was most definitely pregnant." A Newly Standardized IQ score lay in plain sight. Houston underlined the number with his thumb, remarking, "There could have been some simple prenatal problem." "Maybe," she agreed. But probably not, thought Houston. Then quietly and a little sadly, Ms. Lindstrum admitted, "It's a respectably average IQ. Enough to make any parent happy ... if she didn't know any better...." ***

A 13-year-old boy sits hunched over a large, expensive workpad, focusing all of his attentions on his starship. "He loves this kind of project," says his mother. She sits at the front of the classroom, and without a gram of subtlety, she stares at her son's mentor. "I'm relieved that you agreed to meet with me. Our last mentor didn't want to." The woman is small and delicate as a carpet tack, with fierce little blue eyes that hint at a scorching temper. Houston doesn't say what first comes to mind. Instead, he tells her, "I want a good relationship with every parent." "Do you have the other boys, too?" she wants to know. He nods. "John and Mike. Yes." "Try, if you can, to keep Mike away from my Troy." She says what she thinks, then thinks about how it sounds. To soften the moment, she adds, "John's very nice. We like him quite a bit. But the other one ... he scares us, frankly...." Houston says nothing. He refuses to look at the woman. Instead, he stares into the blackness of the on-line screen. It covers the back wall. The teacher who uses this classroom in the morning has turned it off, which is standard policy. He makes a mental note to ask for the screen to be left ready to work, in case they need help. Perhaps sensing his mood, Mrs. Holdenmeister makes eye contact and tries a hard little smile. "If you need it, I can arrange for special software. And lab equipment. Anything of that sort." "Not for now," he says. "Thank you." "Because I'm perfectly willing—" Houston interrupts, explaining, "What I usually do is give my students thought problems. They have to work out what's happening, and why, and what they can do about it." "I see," she says, without conviction. "And sometimes I'll make them face ethical dilemmas, too. What's right, what's wrong. And in the absence of either, what's best." She opens her mouth, then hesitates. After a long pause, she asks, "Would it be all right if I watch you at work again? With my husband. Name the day, and he'll take the afternoon off from work... if that wouldn't be too much trouble—" "I don't believe so." He says it calmly, with a flat unaffected voice.

"Excuse me?" "I wouldn't be comfortable," he explains. "An audience isn't going to help me with what I'm doing here." She doesn't know what to say. Sitting motionless, Mrs. Holdenmeister breathes rapidly, trying to imagine a new, more productive avenue. She decides on pity. "You know," she whispers, "it's been very difficult just getting him into the mentoring program. That Facilitator has fought us all the way." "Well," Houston replies, "I agree with you on this one." That wins a smile, cold but bright. Then she abruptly turns her head, saying, "Darling," with a big, overdone voice. "Do you have something for us?" "Mr. Cross?" says the boy. He's nearly as old as John, but smaller. Not just thinner, but he hasn't found his growth spurt yet. Whatever the reason, he's little larger than the 11-year-old Mike. Where the other boys have quick eyes, Troy's are simpler and slower. And while he has their voice, the words come out at their own studied pace. "How is this, Mr. Cross?" His mother snatches the workpad, then says, "Darling. It's wonderful!" Houston waits. "Isn't it just spectacular, Mr. Cross?" She hands the pad to him, then tells her son, "Great job! It's just wonderful!" The boy and his software have drawn a starship with precise lines and in three dimensions. There are intricate details, and on the next pages, elaborate plans for the bridge and the engines. It's very thorough work, and that's all it is. Quietly, without inflection, Houston says, "Troy." He asks, "Have you seen the movie Starfarer?" "About a thousand times," the boy confesses. "Because that's where this ship came from," Houston warns him. "You've done an exceptional job of copying it." The brown eyes blink. Confused, suspicious. But Mom hears an entirely different message. "Good for you!" she sings out. "Good, good, good for you!" ***

2. Your starship emerges from the wormhole. The first thing you see is a disk. The disk has stripes. Some dark, some candy-colored. Plus there are two blood-red swirls. And the disk itself is flattened on top and below, and it bulges out around its waist. That's what you can see, and what else can you tell me? *** "Is it Jupiter?" John asks. "How do you know it's a planet?" "Can I see stars?" "Yes." "The stripes are clouds. The swirls are hurricanes." "All right. It's a planet," Houston conceded. "Is it Jupiter?" "Two red swirls," Houston repeats. "Yeah, but that wormhole can take us through time. So it could be Jupiter. But millions of years ago." "Good point. But it's not." The boy nods compliantly, then grins. "Tau Ceti 5." "Excuse me?" "It's a planet. Haven't you heard about it?" Sensing an advantage, John explains, "They've found thousands of planets that look like Jupiter. The big telescopes spot new ones every day." "They do," Houston agrees. "This isn't one of them." "No?" The boy licks his lips, puzzled. "What about its sun?" "Good question." The mentor pauses, considering his possibilities. "Two suns," he offers. "Close enough to touch each other." "Can that happen?" "Sometimes. But it's temporary. They'll lose momentum and fall together, then merge into one sun."

"Delicious!" he exclaims. Then, "What else can I see?" "Moons. With your naked eyes, you count five of them." "Big ones?" "I don't know. How do we find out?" John shrugs and says, "With sensors. I'll ask my sensors." "What kinds of sensors?" "Sensors." The boy believes in that word, and why can't Mr. Cross? "But how do they work?" Houston asks. Then he warns him, "Not by magic, they don't. Every machine has its job and its inherent logic." John grunts and says, "I don't know. They just work." Houston shakes his head. The boy compresses his mouth to a point, staring at his elaborate starship. It looks like a crystal chandelier with rockets stuck in its stem. "I don't get it," he finally confesses. "I thought we were going to explore the universe." "So we'll start with good old universal principles," Houston tells him. "About light and energy and mass, for instance. Then later, if you really want, we can move on to those boring old moons." *** The PS epidemic lasted 30 months. Occasionally the clones shared the womb with unrelated embryos. Sometimes they arrived as identical twins or triplets. But most were single babies, active and free of complications. In modern nations, a relatively simple test allowed expectant mothers to learn if their son was a clone. Many chose chemical or clinical abortions. And there was a deluge of orphaned babies that ended up with more forgiving or more desperate couples. In certain backward nations, solutions wore harsher faces. There were even places that pretended to escape the PS plague. Despite the global nature of this illness, despots and their xenophobic citizens denied ever seeing the clones, and they denied every rumor about organized infanticide. And even if babies were dying by the thousands, who could blame them? A man and woman struggle to raise their own child. Why should they be forced to raise an abomination, too? Which was what those babies were.

Abominations. An opinion officially ridiculed by wealthy nations. Even while opinion polls found that a quarter to a third of their own people believed exactly that. *** "The first thing I do is shoot it." "Shoot the planet?" "Are you going to let me?" Mike asks. "Who am I? Part of your crew?" Houston lifts his hands, saying, "Wait. You haven't told me anything about the people on board." "They aren't human." "Okay." "They're robots. Ten feet tall and built of smart metals." Houston nods, then asks, "Do those robots have a leader?" "Sure." "What's his name?" Mike dips his head, staring at his green-ink-and-paper starship. It's a bullet-shaped contraption bristling with every possible weapon. "You'll want a good strong name," says Houston. "Damned right!" "How about Crocus?" he suggests. "I like that! Crocus!" Mike nods and pushes at his hair, then asks, "Can Crocus fire his antimatter cannon?" "Be my guest." "All right. He lets loose a planet-busting round. Then, What happens?" "Nothing." "What do you mean?"

"I mean it takes time for the round to reach its target." Mike shakes his head, and with a disapproving tone says, "John warned me about this game of yours." "You talked to John?" "In the hallway. For just a second." "I thought you didn't like him." "I don't. He's a fat twisted goof." Then the boy shrugs, adding, "But he always talks to me. I can't stop him." Houston watches the narrow face, the narrowed eyes. Then, "How fast is your cannon ball moving?" "Fast." "Make a guess." "Half-light speed. How's that?" "If it takes 20 seconds for the antimatter to reach the planet—" "It's 10 light seconds away." The boy dismisses the entire game, saying, "This is easy. That big planet is ... let me think ..." He does some quick calculations on paper. "Twenty million miles away. No, wait! ... Two million miles. Right?" "Something like that." Mike nods, happily in control. "So then. How big's the explosion?" "Good-sized." "Damn right!" Houston shakes his head, saying, "The shell's moving half the velocity of light, which means it has a terrific momentum. It burrows into the atmosphere and turns to plasma and light, and the explosion comes squirting back up through the vacuum left behind it. Like out of another cannon, sort of." "And the planet explodes—!" "Hardly," Houston warns. "It's not nearly the explosion you want." "That's stupid," Mike tells him. "No," says Houston. "It's not." The boy stares at his starship, confusion and betrayal on his face. And then a sudden little smile comes to the eyes and mouth, and he exclaims, "I get it. That world's antimatter, too. Isn't it?"

"What if it is?" "Jesus," he says, with mock panic. Then he slams his notebook shut and says, "We've got to get the hell out of here!" *** Worldwide, birth rates dropped for better than five years. Couples delayed having children. Millions of women underwent hysterectomies, so great was their fear of conceiving a PS. The epidemic's climax was marked with incompetent news coverage sparking wild rumors. The most persistent rumor was that Phillip Stevens' genes were found inside every newborn, regardless of sex or race. And what made the rumor all the more pernicious was that it was true, in a sense: Humans were a young species. Eskimos and Pigmies shared vast amounts of genetic information. But that abstraction didn't translate well at work and home, and millions of healthy, non-PS offspring were aborted during the panic. Even when a vaccine was available, people remained suspicious. What if it didn't work as promised? Or worse, what if this was just the first plague? What if a hundred mad bastards were putting together their own bugs, and this mess was really just beginning? *** "Maybe that planet has life," says Troy. "Maybe so. How would you find out?" The boy says, "I'll go there." Then he thinks to ask, "May I?" "By all means." Houston describes the two-million-mile voyage, and later, as the Hollywood-built starship slips into the atmosphere, Houston asks, "Who's in command?" "The captain." Troy and his software have drawn a dozen people wearing trim blue uniforms. Everyone resembles a famous actor or actress. The captain is the tallest, oldest man, sporting a short dark beard. "What's his name?" "Storm. Captain Storm." "Is he a human, or a robot?"

"Oh, he has to be human." "Is he a good man?" "Always." The boy looks at Houston with an imploring expression. "He wouldn't be the captain if he wasn't." "Fair enough." Houston nods, smiles. Then he scratches his little beard, saying, "Your ship flies into a cloud and pulls in a sample." "Of what?" "I don't know. At room temperature and pressure, it's liquid." "Like water?" "Exactly." "Maybe there's life in it." "How would you test that?" Houston asks. The boy inhales, then holds his breath. Thinking. "Any ideas?" He exhales, confessing, "I know I'm not supposed to use sensors." "Did John tell you?" Troy shakes his head, then catches himself. "Don't worry," Houston purrs. "You can talk to Mike. I don't care." All the same, the boy seems ashamed. Then Houston prods him, saying, "A microscope is a kind of sensor. And I'll let you use any sensor if you understand how it works." "I do," says Troy. "I've got two microscopes at home." "Okay. Use one of them now." The hands assemble an imaginary slide, then the right eye squints into an imaginary eyepiece. Watching, Houston quietly asks, "What is life?" Then, in more concrete terms, he asks, "How do you recognize it?" "Life is busy," the boy tells him, his voice pragmatic and pleased.

"When I make a slide at home, what I look for are things that are really, really busy." *** 3. You set down on a desolate world. A hard white plain stretches to the horizon. There's no trace of people or cities or even simple life forms. But perhaps something once lived here, and that's why you're putting on your archaeology hat. I want you to dig into a piece of ground. Like a scientist, you need to keep track of everything that you find. Everything. I want you to leave future generations with enough information to resurrect this dig site. Keep notes. Always. Make drawings and maps. And try to figure out what happened here. There's a story waiting. If you can find it. *** Houston has a small one-bedroom apartment that's a short drive from school. It's clean, but rarely tidy. He has lived here for a little more than five years. Prints of famous abstracts hang above the second-hand furniture. On a shelf fixed to one white wall are a pair of trophies. "Mentor of the Year," the plaques read. "Houston Cross." Both trophies show a pair of brass hands clasping— one hand large and grandfatherly, while the other is quite small and only half-formed. He is working in the tiny kitchen. Big old roasting pans are set in a row on the countertop. Inside each pan are pieces of shattered robots and random wires and the carefully dismantled bodies of several plastic toys. Houston bought three skeletal monsters, each with a human-like skull and six arms rooted into a long back. He has cut them apart and thrown out the occasional piece— fossils are almost never whole— and after setting everything into a careful heap, he pours a fresh polymer-plaster into the pans, trying not to spill, and when he does, immediately cleaning up the dribbles and drops. "Breaking news," says the television. It's an old high-density, but Houston built its AI from a kit, then trained it to find what interests him. He glances up and says, "Show me." "— furthermore, the study shows that once a minimally enriched environment is achieved, the boys' intellectual development plateaus—" The pictured face could be John's. It's older than most PS's, and pudgy. "Save it," says Houston. "I'll watch it later." "Okay," says the machine.

He sets the three pans inside the oven, the low heat helping the plaster cure. Then he heats up last night's leftovers in the microwave and, sitting in front of the television, prepares to watch the news story. "Breaking news," says his television. "Show me." "— the controversial book is the fifth most popular title in the world today. The Cuckoo's Boys has sold more than 20 million copies, and that despite being banned in much of Europe and Brazil." The author appears. Beneath him floats a name. Dr. Paul Kaan. An ex-associate of Phillip Stevens, Kaan has a gentle face and hard, uncompromising eyes. Talking to an unseen audience, he explains, "I wrote this book because it's vital that people understand. What the PS's represent is nothing short of a debasing of our species and a debacle for our immortal souls!" Houston watches the three-minute report. Afterward, the screen returns to a mountain vista accompanied by a quiet dose of Grieg. More minutes pass. The oven timer goes off. Finally, almost grudgingly, Houston rises and pulls the pans out of the oven. Then he sits again, watching his dinner grow cold, and the AI asks, "Should I run the synopsis?" "Excuse me?" "About the intellectual development of the PS clones. Are you still interested?" "Not really. No." *** The curved tip of the butterknife bites into the plaster, and the blade itself starts to bow as John presses, working to expose a length of yellow-brown plastic bone. He's been working quickly, almost frantically, for most of the hour, taking notes only when coaxed. After two months together, Houston feels sure that the boy should be enjoying himself. But something is wrong, distracting him. It isn't much of a guess when Houston asks, "What's going on at home?" "Nothing," John blurts. "Okay." "Nothing," he says again. Then as if caught in the lie, he adds, "Well, yeah. I got in a fight last night." "With your mom?" "No. Her boyfriend." He shakes his head, then shoves hard with the knife, the entire bone popping out of its hole. "Notes," Houston urges.

"I know. I know." Abbreviated, useless observations are jotted down. Then everything comes to a halt. John drops the knife and says, "My wrist hurts. Really bad." Then he stares out the window, dumbfounded rage in the eyes and the hard-set mouth. After a long moment, Houston asks, "What happened last night, John?" "I'm not him." Houston waits. "That boyfriend of hers ... he always calls me Phillip." The boy deepens his voice, saying, "Phillip, bring me this. Phillip, you're in my way. Phillip, get the hell lost." "But you're not Phillip Stevens." John looks at his feet now. Shaking his head. "You're just the man's genetics." "I told him that." Houston says, "Good." "PS was a different person than me. Right?" "Absolutely." "I mean, he was born in a different century, and in another place. Everything about his life was different than mine. Right?" "Did you tell him that?" "Yeah. But all he did ..." he just laughed at me. He said, "That's just what old Phillip would say, if he was here." Houston says nothing. "Fucker," says the boy. Viciously, with a pure scalding hatred. Then with a low, stern voice, his mentor suggests, "You shouldn't, maybe. I know you don't like your mother's friend, but calling him that name—" "No, Mr. Cross," John interrupts. "I'm talking about the other fucker." *** For four years, law enforcement agencies followed every wrong lead, interviewed millions of earnest,

mistaken individuals, and through means legal and otherwise, they pulled up the bank and tax records of more than a billion suspects. But in the end, a routine traffic accident gave them Phillip Stevens. An unidentified man driving a dilapidated pickup truck happened to rear-end a young mother. Bumpers locked. When two uniformed officers arrived, the man was staring at a PS child riding in the back seat. Suddenly he panicked, pulling a weapon and discharging it into the air. Witnesses saw him fleeing into a nearby warehouse. There was a second muted shot. Eventually, a SWAT team broke into the warehouse and discovered a body lying in a tiny men's room, the scene filthy with blood and bone and bits of drying brain matter. Subsequent tests proved that the corpse belonged to the missing billionaire. His face and skin color had been altered by surgical means, but his famous DNA was instantly recognized by five reputable labs, including his own. The young mother was labeled a hero, then lost the label when she refused 10 million dollars for her role in ending the manhunt. Furthermore, she enraged many by admitting that she only wished she had known who the man was ... she wanted to thank Phillip for giving her her wonderful son! ... *** Youth is a blessing. When Mike takes the knife to the plaster, he believes. He is eleven, and this is fun, and he's enthralled. Intent, absolutely focused, each slice into the whiteness is full of possibilities. Like John and every other young boy, PS or not, scientific ritual distracts him from his fun. Notes are taken, but only under duress. Working with ink on paper, Mike jots and sketches. Then he picks up the knife with both hands, making a game of picking his next quadrant, and after a calming breath, he cuts chisels a deep wedge of plaster. Houston can't remember where he put which artifact, and so it's nearly a surprise to him when the boy uncovers a single golden eye gazing up at the alien sky. Mike says, "Shit." He giggles and says, "Neat," and goes to work with an old toothbrush, using bristles bent against Houston's teeth, sweeping away the clinging dust. Half of the period is invested exhuming the skull. It's small and obviously plastic, yet something about it intrigues the boy. He can't stop smiling afterwards, moving to the next quadrant and working his way down to a severed hand clinging to a toy weapon. With a dissecting needle, he shoves at the trigger. A weak light and muted whine come from beneath the hardened plaster. Houston waits. The boy looks up, grinning.

"Wal-Mart?" he says matter-of-factly. Disappointed, Houston shrugs and says, "Maybe." But the boy's attitude shifts. With his next breath, he's back on that other world, and with a bleak authority, he says, "This is some ass-kicking monster. So something really tough must have killed it. That's what I think!" *** After the bell rings, the hallway jams with students. Houston's habit is to walk each boy to the door, then stand there and watch the kids pass by. The sixth-graders are still very much children; while the eighth-graders, and particularly the girls, are metamorphosizing into their adult selves. By the end of the year, Houston will catch himself watching the young women. When he first began mentoring, a certain kind of girl might offer glances and winsome smiles. But five-plus years is a long time, and his wilting hair and the graying beard makes him look older than their fathers. Houston has, in effect, vanished from their hormonal radar. Mike's locker is straight across the hall. Still grinning about the buried skull, he fingers his lock, and when it doesn't recognize him, he slams it hard against the gray steel, then tries again. Troy steps up behind him, saying something. The two boys talk for a moment. Differences in age and Mike's bleached hair make them look like siblings, not twins. And it helps that Troy carries himself with a slump-shouldered shyness, while his younger brother is the cockier, self-assured one. Houston tries to read lips. And faces. And postures. Then he notices other students. Like him, some stare. One boy points, which triggers a second to follow his lead. Then a tall girl giggles and shouts, "Which one's real? Which one's real?" Mike calmly flips the girl off. Troy just dips his head, trying to ignore the taunt. Then as Houston starts to say something to the girl— acidic and cutting and cold— she turns and skips past him, still giggling, a bony elbow clipping his elbow as she passes, never noticing him. *** In the end, Troy is the only boy to reassemble the entire skeleton. What's more, he uses resins and a bottomless patience to sculpt bones to replace what's missing. When the others have gone on new

missions, he continues to happily piece together and repair. In the end, both a tiny toy robot and the skeleton man look like museum displays, mounted on a new plaster landscape that he and his mother built on a rainy Saturday. Houston hangs a dozen concepts on those toys. Entropy. Evolution. Anatomy. "Those extra arms wouldn't work," he explains. "No shoulders, so there's no place to anchor the muscles. Is there?" The boy shrugs. "I guess not." "Why would a six-armed man evolve?" With an enduring patience, he says, "I guess he must have needed them." "The universe tends to slide from order into disorder. Have you ever heard that before, Troy?" "When Mom cleans my room." When he laughs, he sounds most like John. Like Mike. Like many hundreds of thousands of boys. But the grim, abstract heart of this entropy business remains out of reach. He shrugs again, and with an easy-going stubbornness, he confesses, "I don't think about that stuff much." Trying to cushion the bad news, he shrugs and smiles, admitting, "I'm not like them, Mr. Cross. Sorry." *** The bookstore still accepts cash. What's more, it's large enough to keep a ready inventory of bestsellers. No need to wait around three minutes while your purchase is printed and bound. Houston can pick up a fresh copy from under a sign that reads: "Controversial. #1 Seller!" Then he can take the copy up front and pay, asking for a sack, please. The fear of discovery is wholly irrational. And worse, it's laughable. But Houston has mentored more than a dozen kids, and various parents know him, and countless teachers and administrators would recognize him on sight. Those are all exactly the kinds of people who might be browsing in a bookstore on a warm October night, which is why he takes precautions, and why he feels secretly nervous, stepping outside and strolling to his car with a forced nonchalance. No parking slots are left at his apartment's lot. Houston's forced to leave his little car on the street. As he enters the building, he finds half a dozen neighbors and their friends on their way to a Halloween party. All are in costume, and drunk. The party must have a theme; everyone wears the same full mask, the adult Phillip Stevens reborn with rubber and fake hair.

"Out of our way!" one man shouts. "Genetic superiority coming through!" says another. A woman says, "Stop that," and slaps a hand off her ass. Then she slides up against Houston, beery breath telling him, "You look different. You look awfully cute!" "He's not," says the first man. "He's inferior," says the second man. Then they're past him. And Houston stands on the bottom stair for a long while, doing nothing but breathing, holding tight to the rail with his free hand. *** 4. You pop out the wormhole and find yourself inside a clear thick gel. This universe is a thick transparent goo that goes on forever. Fire your engines, and you can move. But barely, and your hull creaks and groans, and the instant you stop your engines, your ship comes to an abrupt halt. Now a monster swims out of the gelatin. It dwarfs the largest whale, and it's covered with tree-sized hairs that beat like oars, carrying it straight at you. What do you do? No, that weapon won't work here. And that one won't kill it. Just pisses it off, in fact. So what now? You can run, but the monster is faster. It's ready to eat you and your ship. Whole. And you've got four seconds to think this through and tell me: Where are you? Now three seconds. And two. And one. ***

"Mr. Cross," John blurts. "There's something new here!" Houston fights the temptation to look for himself. Instead, he sits back and watches the boy twist at the knobs, his jaw dropping an instant before he leaps back. Dramatic, overdone. "God, it's huge!" "Draw it," Houston coaches. "Okay, I'll try!" The boys and mentor have set up an aquarium at the back of the classroom— five gallons of tapwater with its chlorine removed, then sweetened with straw and oxygenated with a simple airstone. Over the past five days, using Troy's donated microscope, they've watched the microbal community explode and evolve, bacteria followed by hungry parameciums— the "monsters" of the gel universe— and now the parameciums are serving as fodder for an even larger, more wondrous monster. "It's got wheels," John reports. "Where?" "On this end." John commands the circles in his drawing to spin, giving his creation a liveliness. "They go around and around, then stop. And then they go again." "How big is it?" "Huge," the boy declares. Then he peers into the eyepiece with his right eye— none of the boys can resist pinching his left closed— and suddenly, with a quieter, more honest astonishment, he says, "Jesus, it ate one!" "One what?" "One of the parameciums. I saw it!" Houston picks up the workpad, trying to remember when he first saw a rotifer swimming across a glass slide. "You should look at it, Mr. Cross. Look!" Anticipation makes the mouth dry. He bends over the microscope, the fine adjustment knob spinning easily between finger and thumb. As promised, the rotifer seems vast. And as if answering his wish, he watches while one of the football-shaped protozoa is caught in that intricate mouth, spinning hairs pulling the transparent carcass inside a transparent body. Water eating water. When you got down to it, that's what it's all about. ***

The woman teaches science at a different school. Their relationship is three years old, and it is convenient, and it has mostly run its course. They see each other infrequently. But as it happens, she's at Houston's apartment on that weekend evening when the television interrupts them, saying, "Breaking news." "Not now," he tells it. But the machine obeys its rigorous instructions. "Important, breaking news." "Maybe the President's been shot," says the woman. Then she sits up and says, "Anyway, I probably need to get home." She pulls a heavy sweater over her head, speaking through the frizzy red wool. "I want to see this news first." "Show us," says Houston. "— the gunman apparently turned the weapon on himself, committing suicide. At least 14 students died, while nine more are hospitalized, six in critical condition—" "Where is this?" Houston asks. "Australian Independent—" "From the beginning. Now." Schools always look like schools. Houston stares at a glass and brick building as the narrator reports, "Today, an unidentified male walked into the Riverview School for the Gifted, shouted inflammatory phrases, then produced a pair of handguns, killing more than a dozen boys in their early teens—" "Shit," says the woman. Houston is silent. "All of the deceased, and all but two of the injured, are clones of Phillip Stevens. At this point, it's assumed that the murderer was singling them out...." On screen, grim-faced paramedics are carrying dark sacks. Some of the sacks seem heavy, while others are less so. The woman sits next to Houston, exhaling hard. She says, "Shit," quietly. Then with a different voice, "Have you seen my rings?" "On the kitchen counter." She always leaves her diamond and wedding band on the counter. But she doesn't move. Instead, she places a damp hand on Houston's bare knee, telling him, "This sounds horrible. But I'm surprised that it's taken this long for this sort of tragedy to happen. You know?" He doesn't speak. His lover gives him a few seconds, then asks, "What are you thinking?"

He stares at those rubber sacks set in a ragged row, and he thinks that it's odd. As they are now, robbed of their faces and souls, those boys have never looked more alike. *** "We'll have new security measures naturally." Ms. Lindstrum whispers, trying to keep her words private. It's a week after the Riverview Massacre, but there have already been three more attacks In France. In White Russia. And two PS's dead in Boston. "Cameras in the hallway," she promises. "At least one armed guard stationed in the front office. And all of us who work directly with the boys ... we'll naturally have to go through an extensive security check ..." "I've already been scrutinized," says Houston. "Six years ago." "It's a formality," she assures. He doesn't mention the obvious: Any determined person can kill these boys anywhere in time and space. No reasonable amount of security will protect them. And unreasonable security will just make their lives more constricted, and their murders more noteworthy. Houston doesn't say one word, watching Troy working at the back of the room. "You did speak with them?" Ms. Lindstrum inquires. "About what happened in Australia, I mean." "That next day," he says. "How were they?" "John was shaken. 'Killing someone is always awful,' he told me." Houston closes his eyes, the voices and faces coming back to him. "Troy acted sad, and sorry. But I don't think he appreciates what happened. It's on the other end of the world, and I think his mother shields him from the news. So none of it's quite real." "And Mike?" "Pissed, more than anything." "That's sounds like him," she chimes in. But it wasn't a simple anger. The boy had made fists and drummed on the top of his desk, growling, "It won't happen to me." "It won't, but why not?" Houston had asked. "I'm not the same as the others. I look different." He nodded explaining with an amoral practicality, "If some asshole comes to school firing, he's going to shoot John first. Then Troy. And finally me. Except I'll have run away by then!"

Houston neglects to mention any of that conversation. Misreading his grim expression, Ms. Lindstrum says, "I wouldn't worry. This is a good community, in its heart. Nothing tragic's going to happen here." He just looks at her. She starts to ask, "What are you thinking?" But just then Troy spins in his chair, calling out, "Mr. Cross? I found a baby snail. Want to see?" "Do I ever!" he blurts. "Do I ever!" *** "It is an honor, Mr. Cross. Houston. May I call you Houston? And thanks for taking the trouble. I know this has to be an imposition." "It isn't," Houston lies. The school district's headquarters are set inside a sprawling single-story building designed on some now-defunct principle of efficiency and/or emotional warmth. The central area is one vast room. Working areas are divided by partial walls and overly green plastic foliage. The ventilation system produces a constant roar, not unlike the Brownian drumming of atoms against a starship's hull. Over that roar, the man in charge of security says, "I mean it. It's an honor to cross paths, sir. We have so much trouble finding good mentors, and keeping them. Which makes you something of a legend around here." Houston gives a little nod. "What can I do for you?" "Very little." The man looks and sounds like a retired police officer. A military cop, perhaps. Dragging a thick hand across the hairless scalp, he says, "You used to be ... what's the term? ... A professional student. At two universities. Is that right?" "Yes." He glances at his monitor. "Your resumé lists several impressive degrees." "I have a trust fund," says Houston. "A little one. It gives me enough security for that kind of lifestyle." "Good for you," says the cop. Without inflection. Houston waits. "Then you moved here and took up mentoring ... six years ago. Correct?" "Correct." Again the hand is dragged across the scalp. "Now I couldn't help but notice. You didn't work with PS's

until this year." "I guess I didn't. No." The cop sits motionless, clear eyes regarding Houston without suspicion. "The boys were too young," Houston offers. "As a rule, I work with middle-schoolers." "That's what I thought." He nudges the monitor just enough to let both of them skim over a life's history. Houston read dates, places. He says nothing. "Of course there were two boys ... older ones who skipped grades ... and they were kicking around your current school before the others...." "True enough." Then with a flat, matter-of-fact voice, Houston points out, "I had other students then. Two girls and a boy. And I felt a certain loyalty to them." "Good for you." Silence. The monitor is eased aside, glare hiding whatever it shows now. The clear eyes grow a little less so, and with a pained voice, the cop says, "I'm awfully sorry. I'm required to ask these questions, sir." "Go on," says Houston. "Are you a member of the Defenders of the Womb?" "No." "Do you know anyone who you suspect could be a member?" "No." "How about the Birth-Righters?" "God, no." "Like I said, I have to ask." He pauses, considering his next words. Or not. Perhaps this is a game that he's played too many times, and he has to remind himself what comes next. "Mr. Cross," he says. "I mean Houston. Have you read any of the anti-PS literature or watched the associated digitals?" Houston sets his jaw, and waits. "I'm sure you know what I mean, sir. There's some awful things being published. That crazy in Australia had stacks of the stuff...."

"The Cuckoo's Boys," says Houston. "Excuse me?" "That book was in the crazy's stacks. As I recall." "Perhaps. But honestly, it isn't on my list of dangerous works." "Isn't it?" Houston leans forward, asking his interrogator, "Why not?" "It isn't in the same category as those other works," he claims, "since it never advocates murder." "No, it doesn't," Houston agrees. "The boys are the blameless product of an evil man." "Says Paul Kaan." "Who used to work for Phillip Stevens. As I recall, they were colleagues and friends." The eyes lift and grow distant. "The moral thing to do is to give the PS's useful lives. But to protect our species, they have to be sterilized, too." The ventilation's rumbling fades away. "It sounds like you know the book," says Houston. But the man won't be caught so easily. "I'm just repeating what I've seen on television, sir. That's all." "But what if?" asks Houston. "What if Congress decides to pass laws and perform a simple clinical procedure on every boy? ..." "Well what, Mr. Cross?" "What's your feeling about that?" "My only concern, sir, is that there is no violence inside our schools." Houston nods, sitting back again. The cop glances down, then asks, "Do you own a firearm, sir?" "No." "Do you possess bomb-making materials?" "Yes." The eyes lift and grow large. An angry laugh, then Houston explains, "I've got a well-stocked kitchen, and there's a filling station at the

end of the block. So in theory, yes, I can make a substantial bomb. Anytime I want." "That's not the best answer. Sir." "Then no, I don't have bomb-making materials." "Good. Thank you." The eyes dip again, and quietly, speaking as much to himself as Houston, he says, "This is what you do all day, isn't it, sir? These little mind games? ..." *** 5. You emerge from the wormhole, what you see is blackness. Perfect, endless blackness. But as your eyes adapt, you begin to make out a faint curtain of light in front of you. And behind you. And above. And below. Now, what do you do? ... *** Mike starts to say, "Sensors," before catching his mistake. He grimaces instead, then tells Houston, "I'll use my thermometer. I put it in the airlock. What does it read?" "About two degrees." "Kelvin?" "Yes." The boy stares at his starship's newest incarnation. It's still armored and bristling with weapons, but now bubble-like portholes line its sides, and the robotic crew has shrunk to human proportions. "All right," says Mike. "I use my barometer. What does it say?" "Nothing." "It doesn't work?" "No. It's reading nothing. Zero." "Pure vacuum." He nods, muttering, "I'm out in space somewhere." Houston waits. "Okay. I shoot my antimatter cannon. What happens?" "Eventually, the shell strikes the curtain of light, and its surface gets bright for as long as it's passing

through. But the curtain's very thin, and most of the shell's mass continues on its merry way." "I get it. There's not much stuff there, is there?" He nods again, then says, "Okay. I follow it." "Okay." "And I reach the curtain?" "Eventually." "Can I get through?" "Eventually." "What's 'eventually' mean?" "A few million years, give or take." "But my throttle's all the way open!" The boy leans back, licking his lips. "In a vacuum, I'd be going nearly light speed!" Houston says, "Agreed." "Okay. I stop inside the curtain. What happens?" "It swirls around you. Like a slow, slow fog." "I take a sample." "How?" Frustration builds, then collapses into resignation. "Okay. I put a jelly jar in the airlock, then open the outer door, and some of the fog drifts into the jar. All right?" "Fine." "I screw down the lid and bring the sample to the lab." Houston says nothing. "And I put everything in my best microscope. What do I see?" "Lights. Tiny, bright-colored points of light." The boys licks his lips, eyes narrowed, one hand absently sweeping the hair out of his baffled eyes. "Most of the lights are dim and red," Houston adds. "Others are yellow. And the brightest few are blue." "What about—?"

Houston shouts, "Wow!" The boy halfway jumps. "What happened?" "A big flash of light!" "Outside somewhere?" "No. From the jar." "How big?" He shakes his head, asking, "Is there damage?" "You're blind now." "Okay. I pop in new eyes. Now what do I see?" "One of those tiny blue lights has vanished. That's the only change." Mike rises to his feet. Trying to concentrate, he steps up to the window, staring at the falling snow as one hand, then the other, plays with his shaggy hair. Several minutes later, he screams, "Jesus!" He smiles and says to the snow, "You made me huge. Didn't you?" *** 6. Jungle. And a Blue, Blue Sea. Swimming in the warm water are fish not too different from our fish, and creatures that resemble porpoises, and something with a round body and paddles and a tiny head stuck on the end of a long, long neck—

*** "A plesiosaur," John blurts. "Exactly." A pause, then Houston adds, "Up in the sky, as close as the Moon now, is a comet. In a few hours, it's going to hit exactly where you are now. It's going to vaporize the water and the limestone below, then set fire to North America, and the world." John winces. Then in a self-conscious way, giggles. "What do you want to do, John?" "I want to watch the plesiosaur. I've always liked them."

Houston knows that. Last night, his AI found a new documentary on Danish TV, and for the next 30 minutes, he plays the subtitled digital on the classroom screen. Then comes lunch. The new semester has a break in the middle of the period. The mentor is expected to fend for himself. And naturally, he doesn't get paid for time not spent teaching. When John returns, Houston outlines the situation again. But this time he closes by saying, "In a very few hours, your plesiosaur, and almost everything else on Earth, is going to be dead." John winces. No giggles. "Fly up to the comet," Houston suggests, "If you want." "I guess." "The coma is beautiful. And the tail extends for millions of miles." He shows him photographs of last year's big comet. "Inside the coma you find a black ball of tar and buried snows. It's barely 10 miles across. If you want, you can stop it now." "I can?" "You've got weapons," Houston points out. "What would you use if you wanted to move a mountain-sized snowball?" "My engines. They'd melt anything." "Do you want to use them?" "I don't get it, Mr. Cross. What are you asking?" "Why would you stop the comet? And why wouldn't you?" "Well," says the boy. Then he licks the tentative hairs over his upper lip, and breathes deeply, and says, "If dinosaurs go on living, then maybe mammals wouldn't get their chance. Which would be bad for us. For human beings." Houston leans forward, saying, "You're going to let the comet hit. Aren't you?" The boy doesn't answer, eyes tracking from side to side. "Would you like to see the comet's impact?" Houston offers. "I found a real good Japanese simulation. It's accurate and it's spectacular, too." John shakes his head. "No, thank you," he says. "But Mike would like it, I bet." "He loved it," Houston confides.

The boy makes fists and drums softly on his desk. "What about the comet, John? Are you going to leave it alone?" "No," the boy squeaks. Houston tries to hide his surprise. Then after a few deep breaths, he asks, "Why?" with a quiet voice. "If it means there'll never be humans—" "Good," says the boy. Once. Softly. But with a hardwon conviction. *** 7. You've decided to become a cat farmer. No, seriously. I mean it. You can make a lot of money selling cat skins. And since you're left with carcasses after you skin them, you start feeding that meat to the new kittens. Who grow up into your next harvest of cats. Which you feed to the next litters of kittens. And so on. And so on. Cats all the way ... Now, what's wrong with that plan? *** Troy says, "Nothing," without hesitation. He thinks this is gross and clever. "But," Houston warns, "you're losing energy at every stage. A cat burns calories to keep itself warm, and it's got a short gut that doesn't digest everything that it eats. That's why your dog chews on your cat's turds. They're full of energy." "Ugh." Giggles. The others understood the problem almost immediately. "Try it this way," says Houston. "How much meat would you have to eat every day? In order to eat enough, I mean." "Ten pounds," the boy guesses. "Forty quarter-pound hamburgers. Really?" "Maybe not." Troy shakes his head, licks his lips. "How about two pounds?" "Fine." Houston nods. "On the first day of school, you'll go to the cafeteria and eat your daily ration. Two pounds of grilled seventh-grader."

"You mean like Mike?" "Exactly." "Neat!" "And you'll do that for a full year. Two pounds worth of seventh-graders every day. Which is more than seven hundred pounds in all." "Mike's not that big. Not yet." Both of them laugh. Hard. Then Houston says, "Remember. A body is bone and gruesome crap that you'd never eat. Maybe half of the carcass won't get on your plate. So how many seventh-graders are you going to need?" Troy hammers out a reasonable estimate. "Ten." "How many eighth-graders are in your class?" "I don't know. Three hundred?" "So we need three thousand seventh-graders. And you can't just lock them in a room and pull one out whenever you're hungry. They need their food, too." "Sixth-graders!" "How many?" "I don't know ... God, thirty thousand! ..." "Right." Houston leans forward, and smiles. "But remember, Troy. Teachers can be awfully hungry people, too." The boy's face grows a little pale. "Three hundred eighth-graders feed how many teachers?" "Thirty." He sickens, but just for a moment. Then the eyes quicken, and for that instant, in his face and eyes, Troy is indistinguishable from the other PS's. "There's three principals. Right?" "I guess there would be. Yes." Houston sits back in his chair, then asks, "Who's left standing? At the end of the year, I mean." Troy sees it instantly. "Only the principals. Right?"

"Right." Then he's laughing too hard to breathe, and he gasps, and he admits to Houston, "I'm not going to tell Mom about this lesson. No, I'm not!" *** 8. You give birth to a child who isn't yours. Genetically speaking. Phillip Stevens hijacks your reproductive system and forces you into having his clone, just as he did with millions of blameless women. Yet you feel blamed. And of course you're bitter. It's only reasonable to play the role of the victim here. It's only human to want revenge. But it's also human to be better than that. To forgive, or at least to forget. To accept and hold and cherish this gift ... ... a better son, frankly, than anything you would have spawned on your own ... *** Saturday morning, and Houston shops for next week's groceries. He spots the boy at the end of a long aisle, and for a half-instant, he isn't sure. It could be another PS, or even just a boy who happens to resemble them. But something about the don't-give-an-inch stance and the habitual pushing of hair out of the eyes tells him that it's Mike. Which means that the tiny woman next to him, lowering a blood-colored roast into the cart, must be his mother. Two aisles later, paths cross. The boy calls him, "Houston." Then he does a thumb-pointing gesture, telling Mom, "This is the guy." She's holding a box of tampons. Without blinking, she throws them into the cart, then offers a tiny hand. "The famous Mr. Cross. Finally. Believe it or not, I've been meaning to get in touch." "It's a pleasure," he replies. "Groceries?" she inquires, gesturing at his cart. "They are," he admits. "What do you think of these prices?" "They're high," Houston volunteers. "Ridiculous," she grouses. Then just as the conversation seems doomed to canned chatter, Mom tells

him, "You know, my boy hates you." "Pardon?" "You drive him nuts. Goofy nuts. I mean, he knows that he's smarter than his brother and sister. And his parents, of course, are perfect idiots—" "Shut up," Mike growls. "You old lady." Mom has a good laugh, then continues. "Anyway, Mr. Cross. Thank you. You've been getting under his skin. Which is the best thing for him, I think." Mike says, "Jesus," and stomps in a circle. His mother takes a step toward Houston, smiling up at him, and with a conspirator's urgent voice, says, "Humble him. Please." "I try," Houston confesses. "Fucking Jesus!" Mike moans, squirming in every sense. Mom turns and glares at her son, her mouth ready to reprimand. Or encourage. Houston can't guess which. But instead of speaking, she looks back at Houston and gives him an odd little smile. Again, he says, "It's been a pleasure." Then he takes his cart and his expensive groceries and moves on. *** The field trip is the result of a lot of pleading and a slippery set of excuses. At first, John says, "You've got to eat lunch. Eat it at my house. It's just a short walk from school." But when Houston firmly refuses, the boy adds, "I've got books you'd like to see. Old ones. About science and stuff." "What books?" Their titles escape him. But they're about dinosaurs and flying saucers, and John adds, "I can't bring them here. They're practically antiques, and something might happen!" Last week, there was a fight at school. Houston didn't see it, but Ms. Lindstrum reported that John was showing his starship to one of his few friends, and another boy stole his workpad. John couldn't stop himself from throwing the first punch. His only punch, it seems. He still sports an ugly maroon bruise beside his left eye. "Mr. Cross," he pleads. "Please come over?" The boy is sick with loneliness. But Houston has to tell him, "We need a better reason. If we're going to get permission, we'll need something special that ties directly to our work here."

The next day, John bursts into the room. "Okay. How's this? We've got a huge stump in our back yard. Hundreds of tree rings showing. Maybe we could do some sort of study, counting back in time and looking at the weather. That kind of stuff." "Good enough," Houston tells him. But the Facilitator has doubts. "It's not up to me anymore," Ms. Lindstrum explains. "If it involves PS's, we'll need permission from the superintendent's office." Houston nods, then says, "The boy really wants this." "Can you blame him?" Houston didn't know that he was. She promises to make the request. And for the next full week, John's first question every day is, "When are we going?" "Never," seems like a possible answer. But suddenly the faceless powers grant their blessing. Appropriate disclaimers are filled out. A parental signature is produced. And like explorers bound for some great adventure, the two of them pack up their equipment and make the four-block trek to an anonymous split level on a quiet side street. All the way there, John is giddy with excitement. Effusive to a sickening pitch. Five years old, at the most. He tells silly jokes about farts and singing frogs. He boasts that he'll be a great scientist before he's 30. With an overdone clumsiness, he trips on a crack in the sidewalk and drops in a slow-motion tumble into his own front yard. Then he suddenly grows quiet and thoughtful, saying, "By the way. Mom's boyfriend is gone. Moved out gone, I mean." The trap is revealed. Entering the front door, John cries out, "We're here!" Mom can't look any less prepared for company. Bare feet. Jeans worn white against the chunky ass. A sweatshirt of some unearthly green. Physically, she bears no resemblance to her son. Chinese and European. Pretty in a fucked-over way. Sleepy, teary eyes regard this onslaught with a genuine horror. "Oh," she finally exclaims. "That's today, isn't it?" The boy drops his workpad on the floor. "Mom!" But the woman recovers. "Just a minute! Be right there!" She gallops out of sight, and from the back of the house screams, "Food's in the fridge, hun!"

"She forgets things," says John, shaking from anger. "Don't worry about it," Houston tells him. His voice is angry, too. But the inflection goes unnoticed. Lunch is egg-salad sandwiches with off-brand pop to wash them down. Mom returns during an Oreo dessert. Her clothes have improved— newer jeans and aerobics shoes— and she's washed her face and combed her hair. But obviously, she'd rather be anywhere else. With anyone else. A condition that gives the adults common ground. "I'm glad to meet you," she tells Houston. "And I'm glad to meet you," he echoes. They chat. It's polite, rigorously simple chatter. How long has Houston been a mentor? How long have they lived here? What about this warm weather? How was the sandwich, and does anyone want any more cookies? Adults know how to be polite. They can converse for hours, revealing nothing about their true selves. Yet John is visibly thrilled by their prattle. He grins more and more. Mom finally asks, "Aren't you supposed to be doing a project?" And he tells her, "There's still time," without glancing at the clock. Eventually, the kitchen grows silent. Houston turns to the boy and says, "Maybe we should get busy. You think?" "Oh, sure. Why not?" They have only a few minutes to invest in the promised tree stump. Which is ample, since it's too old and weathered to teach much more than the fact that wood rots. Standing over that brown mass of fungus and carpenter ants, John looks at him expectantly and says, "Well?" Houston imagines a dozen responses, and John's black disappointment. So he says simply, "Interesting," without defining what it is that interests him. John hears what he wants, and for the next week, pesters Houston shamelessly. He says, "I'm worried about my mother. She's too lonely." He says, "You know, there's a new restaurant up on Acer. I'd take Mom, but I don't have the money." In a pleading tone, he confesses, "You're my best friend in the world, Mr. Cross. I mean that!" Then, the pestering stops. And Houston discovers that he misses the boy's clumsy match making. He misses it but doesn't say so, knowing better than to trust his own weakness. Then one day the boy arrives with a purple bruise

matching the last one, and Houston asks, "Did you fight that same jerk? I hope not." "I didn't," John mutters. Then he looks past Houston, a cold glare matching the accusing voice. "The boyfriend's back. Again." *** "I know this seems impolite. I got your address from one of last year's parents—" "Come in, Mrs. Holdenmeister." "You've probably got plans for tonight." "Not really." He offers her the sofa, then sits opposite her. Looking at those hard blue eyes, he secretly thinks, "You're one scary bitch." "What can I do for you?" he inquires. "About Troy," she mutters. Pale hands turn to fists. "About that grade—" "The B+?" "You're his mentor. You know how much he adores science." "Absolutely." "I just don't think ... after he earned A's last semester ..." "We had a big project this quarter. He had to do his own research and write a paper about what he learned—" "Didn't he?" "No, actually." He says it flat out, then sits back and asks, "Did you come here by yourself, Mrs. Holdenmeister?" She starts to ask, "Why?" Then she shakes her head, admitting, "My husband's in the car. Waiting." With an indiscriminate rage, she admits, "He doesn't think that I should be going to this much trouble—" "He's right." She hesitates. Then after measuring him with those deadly eyes she says, "I saw Troy's paper. I saw it, and it was very good." "Because you helped him write it." She flusters easily, nothing about it genuine. "I don't think that's true! ..."

"I asked him. And your son has a wicked streak of honesty." She hesitates again, not sure what to say. "It's a quarterly grade," he reminds her, "and it's a B+. Which is very respectable, Mrs. Holdenmeister." "Even still," she snaps, "it's on his permanent record." "Fuck his record. Ma'am." She swallows. Goes limp. "We both know, he's not like the others. He doesn't function as well in science. And he won't be anyone's valedictorian." Houston says it, then takes a long deep breath. Then, "Which aren't crimes. And in some ways, those are probably blessings." "I ... I don't know what to say here...." "Let him do his own work. I'll give him a nice little A at the end of the year, and it won't mean shit in ten years. Or two, for that matter." Fists pull close to her belly. "You've got an ugly, awful attitude, Mr. Cross." "Guilty as charged." She mistakes his indifference for weakness. "I plan to complain. To the superintendent himself. A person like you shouldn't be working with impressionable young minds." That's when Houston's rage takes hold of him. Suddenly his mouth take charge, asking, "What exactly did you do to your son? To make him this way, I mean." She goes pale, except for the blazing eyes. "Watching you ..." he sputters. "Seeing all this damned guilt masquerading as love ... I have to wonder if maybe, once you saw that PS baby ... maybe you put a pillow over him and gave him a few good shoves before you got too scared to finish the job! ..." "Shut up!" she screams. And rises. Then with a tight, furious voice, she whispers, "I had a drinking problem. While I was pregnant. You son-of-a-bitch." He says nothing. Feels nothing, he believes.

For an instant, she shivers hard enough to lose her balance. Then she puts her hand against the wall, and says, again, "You're a horrible man." "Tell me what I don't know." She tries to murder him with her eyes. It nearly works, it seems. But Houston makes himself stand, facing her, telling her simply, "You'd better go, Mrs. Holdenmeister. Now." *** 9. I want you to invent a world, a universe, for the other boys. I'll send them there. In their starships, they'll explore and decipher the mysteries that you leave for them. And maybe they'll escape in the end, and maybe they won't. Which means, in other words, if you want to make a dangerous place, you can do that. You've got my blessing. Just as they have the same blessing, and that's all the fair warning I'm going to give you ... okay? ... *** "Is it John's world, or Troy's?" "Does that matter?" "No," says Mike. Then, "Yes." He licks his lips, drums his fists, then tells Houston, "I bet it's Troy's." "Why?" "Because it's neat. You know. Not sloppy." A map of the world covers the long screen. It has two blue seas and a brilliant dash of icecap, and its single continent is yellow except where it's brown. It is not sloppy because it's authentic. The image comes with NASA's compliments, and what Mike sees has been fitted together from a thousand fuzzy, partial images gathered by orbiting telescopes. The physical and chemical data are equally authentic. But what waits on the world's surface belongs entirely to John. "I'm not going to tell you who did this," Houston warns. "Just like I won't tell the others which world is yours." "You'd better not," he growls.

"What are you going to do first, Mike? You've got a mission here." "I'll fire my cannon. Ten times." Houston says nothing. "Well, can I?" The mentor says, "If you want," and shakes his head sadly. "Okay. I do it, and what happens?" "The explosions melt the icecap, boil the oceans, then cause the crust to turn to magma." "Neat!" Houston says nothing. "Is there anything left alive down there?" "I don't know. You tell me." The boy describes his flight into the hell. Crocus, the top robot, collects samples of atmosphere and liquid rock. Mentor and student agree that nothing lives there. Even if there had been a thriving biosphere, it was vaporized, leaving not so much as a fossil tooth to mark its glorious past and promise. "Congratulations," says Houston, the word tipped in acid. But Mike just shrugs and says, "That was easy." Then he's laughing, admitting, "I don't know why I was so worried." *** Half an hour later, the bell rings. Houston accompanies Mike to the door. The hallway is already jammed with scurrying bodies and sharp, overly loud voices. The boy, still proud of his carnage, grins and wades out into the current. A bigger, older boy drives an elbow into him. But it's barely felt. Mike reaches his locker and touches the lock, then slams it hard against the steel. And then John appears beside him, touching him on the arm, obviously asking him, "Which world did you get? Which world? Which world? Which?" Houston can see their faces, can halfway read their lips. He watches as Mike glances up at this older, fatter boy, and showing the most malicious grin, the boy says, "Two oceans. And some kind of yellow land." John can't resist. He confesses, "That's mine!"

Mike says something like, "Was it?" Then John asks a "What'd you think, what'd you do" sort of question. And Mike tells him. With both hands, he creates the universal symbol of an explosion, and loud enough to be heard, he says, "Boom!" There's no time to intercede. Before Houston can force his way through the bystanders and into the fight, John has already slammed Mike's head into the lockers. At least three times. Maybe four. And Mike counters with a fist into the belly, leaving his attacker on his knees, gasping and pale and crying for every reason imaginable. *** "It's just us for the next few days," Houston explains. But Troy already knows the news. There's nothing bigger in a school than a bloody brawl. Unless of course it's when two PS's are doing the brawling. Troy shakes his head, asking, "Why did they fight?" Houston starts to offer the simple explanation, then hesitates. It occurs to him that he barely knows either boy, much less their real motivations, and thinking that he understands them is dangerous, and stupid, and very much a waste. So instead, he admits, "I really don't know why they fought, or why they seem to hate each other so much." "I know," the boy tells him. Anticipation makes Houston lean forward. "Why, Troy?" "They've got to," he assures. "But why?" With an endearing patience, the boy shakes his head, warning him, "You can't know it, Mr. Cross." "You might want to. But you just don't belong." *** 10. Again, your starship is tiny. Microscopic. Suspended within that vast ocean, living water swimming through the dead. But this time the monster isn't some marauding paramecium. This time what you see has a blunt

head and a long ropy tail, and it isn't feeding. Instead it's moving with a singleness of purpose, passing you and your ship without the smallest regard. In anger, or maybe out of simple curiosity, you fire your weapons at it. The monster wriggles and dies. And just like that, Phillip Stevens is never born. And you, all of you, instantly and forever cease to exist. I'm not going to ask why. It's easy enough to see the reason. And I won't dwell on the paradoxes inherent in this mess. No, what I want to ask is the hardest question of all: Is this world better off without Phillip and the PS's? Or is it worse off? That's the only question worth asking. And you can't give me any answer. Sixty years from now, maybe. But not today. Not here. You're smart but not that smart. And even in 60 years, I doubt if you'll look me in the eye— all the thousands and thousands of you— and to the man, you will say in one indivisible voice, "The world is better off," or, "It's worse." The best questions are always that way.... *** The Sun is plunging behind the Moon. At its height, the eclipse will reach 80+ percent coverage. Which is a long way from a total eclipse, yes. But since it is a warm, cloudless day, and it's noon, the effect is dramatic. There comes a growing chill to the air. A sense of misplaced twilight. Houston twists his head and says, "Listen." But hundreds of students are scattered across the school's lawn, enjoying the cosmic event, and it's hard to hear anything but their endless roar. "Listen to the birds," he tells them. Both boys nod in the same way, John saying, "I hear them. They're singing." Troy points and cries out, "Look!" Swallows have appeared, streaking back and forth. Then a younger voice says, "Look under the trees." Mike stands behind them. Smiling, but not. Horizontal cuts mark where his face struck the vent on his locker. And he seems taller than before. Houston noticed it yesterday— Mike's first day back from his

suspension— but it's more obvious now. A growth spurt took him during his week-long suspension, adding a goodly fraction of an inch to his gangly frame. "The way the light is," he says. Pointing. John sits up. "Yeah, look! What's going on, Mr. Cross?" Crescent-shaped splashes of light dapple a sidewalk and the shady grass. Houston stands, hands on hips. "I don't know," he lies. "What do you think? Guesses?" "It's the eclipse," Troy volunteers. "Duh," says Mike. Houston reprimands him with a look. Then as he starts to ask his next question, he notices a group of kids staring at them. Talking among themselves. Eighth-graders. Every last one of them female. Houston's boys are oblivious to the stares. Mike drops to the ground. He sits as far as possible from John while still being part of their group. "It's got something to do with how the light bends," he volunteers. "It's like you can see the Sun in those little crescent things." Troy says, "I bet so." Then John says, "This would have been a full eclipse back in dinosaur times." "Why?" asks Troy. "The Moon was closer," Mike tells him. "It covered more of the Sun back then," John adds. Troy turns. "Is that right, Mr. Cross?" He starts to nod, then notices one of the girls approaching them. The hesitation in her walk and the other girls' giggles implies this is a dare. Instead of speaking, Houston holds his breath, and all the boys grow silent, too. She's a tall, willowy creature with full breasts and a model's face. And in a voice that comes wrapped in a nervous, electric energy, she says, "Hi, you guys." Then she turns, and sprints back to her friends. "What the fuck was that?" Mike growls. "What the fuck?" But Houston laughs out loud, saying, "That." Saying, "Is a woman enamored." Saying, "I know the look. And you just better get used to it, boys." ***

"At least I can see him now," she says. "Can you?" "Barely," says the short man. "I've never gotten a writer's autograph. Have you?" "I'm not much of a reader." "Neither am I," she confesses. Then she turns to Houston, asking him, "Have you ever read anything better than this?" He glances at the woman. Then he looks up the long line, saying, "Yes." She doesn't seem to notice. Holding her copy of The Cuckoo's Boys in both hands, she tells everyone in earshot, "It had to be said. What Dr. Kaan says here." Houston manages to keep silent. This is a Saturday afternoon. He drove two hundred miles to stand here. The author sits in the center of a long table, flanked by thousands of copies of his phenomenal bestseller. "The New Edition," reads the overhead banner. "New Chapters! Fresh, Innovative Proposals!!" The short man asks, "Do you know what's in the new chapters?" "I'm dying to find out," she confesses. Houston waits. Then after a while, he says, "Tailored viruses." "Excuse me?" says the woman. "Kaan thinks we should create a virus that would target Phillip Stevens' genetics. It would destroy the clones' somatic cells. In other words, their sperm." She says, "Good." The line slips forward. Houston finds himself breathing harder, fighting the urge to speak. A pretty young woman says, "Please, open your book. One copy, only. To the page you want signed. And please, don't ask for any personalized inscriptions." The author wears a three-piece suit. He looks fit and hardy, and smug. Houston avoids looking at the man's eyes. The line moves. With both hands, the woman in front of Houston opens her book. The short man bends and mutters something to the author, getting nothing but a signature for his trouble.

The woman takes his place, gushing, "I'm so glad to meet you. Sir!" Kaan smiles and signs his name, then looks past her. Houston's legs are like concrete. Suddenly, he is aware of his pounding heart and a mouth suddenly gone dry. But he steps forward, and quietly says, "You know, I have a PS son," as he hands his opened book forward. "And I took your good advice." The author's face rises, eyes huge and round. "I cut off his nuts. Want to see 'em?" Houston asks, reaching into a pocket. "Help!" the author squeals. A pair of burly men appear, grabbing Houston and dragging him outside with the rough efficiency of professionals. Then after a quick body search, they place him in his car, and one man suggests. "You should go home, sir. Now." "All right," Houston agrees. They leave him, but then linger at the bookstore's front door. Houston twists the rearview mirror, looking at his own face. Tanned and narrow, and in the brown eyes, tired. He thinks hard about everything until nothing else can be accomplished. Which takes about 30 seconds. And that's when he starts the engine and pulls out into traffic, feeling very light and free, and in the strangest ways, happy. *** 11. You get an end-of-the-school-year field trip out of me. I always always take away students down to our little community's renowned natural history museum. Most have already been there. According to one boy, maybe five hundred times already. But never with me. Never benefitting from my particular slant on mammoths and trilobites and the rest of those failures that they've got on display down there. Don't bring lunch money. We'll be eating at Wendy's or the Subway Barn, and I'm the one buying. Don't bring your workpads or notebooks. You won't need them. But if you would, please ... remember to wear good shoes. Shoes you can walk in. And if it's at all cold outside, please, for god's sake, wear a damned coat! ... *** "It's been refused," says Ms. Lindstrum.

"Excuse me?" "Your proposed field trip. I know the boys were looking forward to it. But what with the latest tragedy, people want to be cautious." Which tragedy? Houston wonders. In Memphis, five PS's were found dead in a basement, each body savagely mutilated. In Nairobi, a mob killed three more. Or was it the UN's failure to condemn Singapore's new concentration camp that's masquerading as a special school. "I'm sorry," she offers. Over the school year, her office has shrunk. Paper files and stacks of forms have gathered, choking the available space into a stale few breaths and two uncomfortable people. Again, she says, "I am sorry." "It's all right." His eyes find hers. What worries him most is the way that she blinks now. Blinks and looks past him. "Is it because of that fight? Because John and Mike did fine during the eclipse, and since," he says. Then he tells her, "There won't be any incidents. I can absolutely guarantee it." She sighs, then says, "No PS-only field trips are being authorized." "So let me take along one or two of my old students. To beat that rule." "No," she replies. Too urgently and with a wince cutting into the half-pretty face. Or maybe he's just being paranoid. Houston offers a shrug of the shoulders. "Are you sure there's nothing we can do?" "I'm certain," Ms. Lindstrum tells him. "But the four of you could throw a little party for those three periods. Safe in your classroom. In fact, I'll arrange for food and pop to be brought from the cafeteria." "I guess that would work," Houston tells her. Then he puts on his best smile, saying, "Why don't we? A little celebratory party. Fine." *** Maybe it is simple paranoia. But a back-of-the-neck feeling has Houston peering over his shoulder. Every public place seems crowded with suspicious strangers, and his little apartment seems full of dark, secretive corners. He finds himself peeking through curtains, watching the empty parking lot below. Three times he runs diagnostic programs on his phone, searching for taps that refuse to be found. And when he finally manages to convince himself that nothing is wrong, except in his imagination, his old widescreen abruptly stops finding news about the PS's. Instead, it delivers highlights from a teaching conference in Nova Scotia. Which is a signal.

Prearranged, yet surprising. Long ago, Houston taught the AI that if its security was breached, dump all of the old files and start chasing down a different flavor of news. He doesn't fix the protocols now. Instead, he pretends to watch the conferences that are being piped to him, and he runs new diagnostics on the apartment and every appliance. That night before the school party, someone knocks. His lover wears nice clothes and a smile, and she says, "Hello," too quickly. She says, "I hope I'm not catching you at a bad time." She has always, always called before visiting. But not tonight. Houston says, "No, it's a fine time. Come on in." She says, "For a little bit. I'm expected back home." He hasn't seen her for a month. But he doesn't mention it. He sits opposite her and says absolutely nothing, trying to read the pretty face and nervous body, and when she can't tolerate any more silence, she blurts, "Are you all right, Houston?" "Perfect," he says. She swallows, as if in pain. "How about you?" he inquires. "They know about us." She says it, then gathers herself before admitting, "They came to me. And asked about you." "Who asked?" She crosses her arms, then says, "They threatened to tell my husband." Houston calls the woman's name, then asks, "Was it that bald security man? From district headquarters?" "One of them was." "Who else was there?" She shakes her head. "He didn't give me a name." "It's nothing," says Houston. And to an astonishing degree, he believes it. "I've had some trouble with one of the parents. I'm certain that she's filed a formal complaint. That's the culprit here." His lover nods hopefully, staring at the floor.

He tells her, "Everyone's scared that something bad is going to happen here." "I am," she allows. "What did they ask?" "About you," she mutters. "What did you say?" "That I know almost nothing about Houston Cross." Eyes lift, fixing squarely on him. "Which is true. All of a sudden, hearing myself say the words, I realized that you're practically a stranger to me." He says nothing. At this very late date, what can he say? ... *** Mentors are required to check in at the front office. Houston arrives a few minutes earlier than normal signing his name at the bottom of a long page and glancing sideways into Ms. Lindstrum's office, catching a glimpse of her grim face as her door swings shut, closed by someone whom he cannot see. The school's uniformed guard sits nearby, pretending to ignore him. Which is absolutely ordinary, Houston reminds himself. The bell rings. Children pour into the hallway, a brink-of-summer fever infecting all of them. Houston beats the boys to the classroom, then waits in front of the door. For an instant, he fears that they're home sick, or Lindstrum has bottled them up. But no, John walks up grinning, Troy at his side. Then Mike is fighting through the bodies making for his locker ... and Houston tells the others, "Stay with me," and he intercepts Mike, putting a hand on the bony shoulder, saying to all of them, "Change of plans." This spring, the school installed a security camera at one end of the hallway. In the opposite direction, the hallway ends with lockers and a fire door. With the boys following after him, Houston hits the bar, causing the alarm to sound— a grating roar that causes a thousand giddy youngsters to run in circles and laugh wildly. "Hey!" says Mike. "You did that!" "No," says Houston. "It's a planned fire drill. Trust me." Then John asks, "Where are we going? On our field trip?" "Exactly."

"I don't have any permission slip," Troy complains. Houston turns and says, "I took care of all that. Hurry. Please." They climb down a short set of metal stairs, then cut across the school yard. Behind them, mayhem rules. Screaming bodies burst from every door, harried teachers trying to regain some semblance of control. In the distance, sirens sound. As they reach the street, a pair of fire trucks rush past, charging toward the nonexistent blaze. Various cars are parked along the curb. Trying to smile, Houston says, "Guess which one's mine." John says, "That one," and points at a gaudy red sports car. Houston has to ask, "Why?" "It's a neat car," says the boy. "And you're a neat guy!" Now he laughs. Despite everything, he suddenly feels giddy as the kids, and nearly happy. With keys in hand, he says, "Sorry. It's the next one." A little thing. Drab, and brown. Utterly nondescript. But as the boys climb inside, Mike notices, "It smells new in here." "It's a rental," Houston admits. His old heap is parked out in front of the school, as usual. He stashed this one last night. "I thought we needed something special today." "Are we still going to the museum?" Troy asks. He and John share the backseat. Houston says, "No, actually. I came up with a different destination." Mike watches him. Suspicious now. The boys in back punch each other, and giggle, and John says, "Maybe we could eat first. Mr. Cross?" "Not yet," Houston tells them. He drives carefully. Not too fast, or slow. Up to the main arterial, then he heads straight out of town, knowing that Mike will be the first to notice. "Where?" asks the boy. Not angrily, but ready to be angry, if necessary. "There's a few acres of native prairie. Not big, but interesting." Houston looks into every mirror, watching the cars behind them. After a minute, Mike says, "I don't know about this." "That's right," says Houston. "Be suspicious. Of everything."

The smallest boy shrugs his shoulders and looks straight ahead now. Houston glances over his shoulder, telling John, "There's a package under you. In brown paper. Can you get that out for me, please?" "This it?" "Yeah. Can you open it up, please?" The boy never hesitates. He tears away the paper, finding a pair of what look like hypodermic needles wrapped in sterile plastic. "What are these for, Mr. Cross?" "Tear one of them open. Would you?" "Just one?" "Please." It takes a few moments. The plastic is tough and designed not to be split by accident. While John works, Houston turns to Mike and says, "Be suspicious," again. "When I was your age, I was always suspicious. Suspicion is a real skill, and a blessing. If you use it right." The boy nods, wearing a perplexed expression. "Here it is, sir," says John, handing the hypodermic to him. "Thank you." "What is it?" asks Troy. "It looks medical." "It is," Houston admits, removing the plastic cap with his teeth. "People made these things by the millions years ago. If you were poor and gave birth to a mixed race boy, you could test his blood. Like this." He doesn't let himself flinch, punching his own shoulder with the exposed needle. Then he shakes the device for a moment, and shows everyone the dull red glow. "Now unwrap another one. Yeah. And hand it to me." John obeys. In the same smooth motion, Houston jabs Mike in the shoulder. "Sorry," he offers, shaking the second device. Then he puts them together, and with a voice that can't help but break, he says, "Both showing red. See? And what do you think that means?" *** 12. I used to be Phillip Stevens. He says the words, then sucks in a breath and holds it.

Not one boy makes the tiniest sound. Finally, laughing uneasily, Houston asks, "What do you think about that? John? Troy? Mike?" "I don't believe you," Mike growls. "No?" "That's a stupid shit thing to say." The boy's anger is raw and easy, bolstered by the beginnings of panic. He takes a gasping breath. Then another. Then he strikes his own thighs with both fists, telling Houston, "He died. The asshole offed himself. Everyone knows that." Again, silence. Houston glances at the mirror. The boys in back wear identical expressions. Lost, and desperately sad. Troy sees him watching then looks back over his shoulder, probably hoping to find help coming to rescue them. But there isn't another car in sight. "You two," says Houston. "What do you think?" "It was Dr. Stevens' body," John offers. "That's what the police said." "The police," Houston points out, "found a body with Phillip's physical features as well as his DNA. But a body isn't the man. And if anyone could have arranged for a bunch of dead meat and organs infused with his own DNA, wasn't it Phillip Stevens?" "A full-grown clone?" says Mike. "With a massive head wound. And what the press didn't report— except as wild rumor— were those occasional disparities between the corpse on the table and the fugitive's medical records." "Like what?" Mike mutters. "Like scars and stuff?" John asks. "No, every scar matched. Exactly." Houston nods and pushed on the accelerator, telling them, "But those things would be easy enough to fake. The body was grown in a prototype womb-chamber. The brain was removed early, and intentionally. No pain, no thoughts. Phillip did that work himself. He broke the clone's big left toe, then let it heal. He gave the skin the right patterns of mole and old nicks and such. He even aged the flesh with doses of radiation. And he kept the soulless clone relatively fit through electrisometrics and other rehab tricks." The only sound is the hum of tires on pavement. Finally, Mike asks, "So what was wrong with that body?" "Not enough callus: Not on its fingertips or the bottoms of its feet." Houston nods knowingly, looking across the blurring countryside, then straight ahead. "And even though the brain tissue was scrambled, the

FBI found problems. Even with dehydration there wasn't enough brain present. And what they had in jars didn't have the dendritic interconnections as you'd expect in mature genius mind." Again, Troy looks back the way they had come. Houston turns right on a graveled road, and over the sudden rattling of loose rock, he tells them, "It's not far now." Even Mike looks sad. "The original Houston Cross was a loner. No family, and few prospects." Houston says it, then adds, "For a few dollars and a new face, that Houston acquired a new life. And he doesn't even suspect who it is that bought his old one." John starts to sob loudly enough to be heard. Mike turns and glares at him. "God, stop it. You baby!" Over the crest of the hill is a small green sign announcing Natural Area. The tiny parking lot is empty. Which is typical for a weekday, Houston knows. He pulls in and stops, turning off the engine and pocketing the key. "All right," he says. "Out." The boys remain in their seats. Houston opens his door and stands in the sunshine. "Out," he tells them. From the back, Troy squeaks, "Are you going to kill us? Mr. Cross?" The words take him completely by surprise. He shivers for a moment, then makes himself stop. And he looks in at all of them. And he tells them, "You can't begin to know how much that hurts." *** 13. Why did Phillip Stevens create you? Any ideas? Forget my little announcement. My name is Houston Cross, and I want you to explain to me why your father did what he did? Because I know you must have lain awake nights wondering just that.... ***

The four of them walk in single file through the big bluestem prairie, following a narrow path up a hill, both hill and path vanishing in the same step. Houston stops for a moment, watching the horizon and the rolling windswept land, farm fields on all sides and this little patch of grass and wildflowers tucked into a spare 40 acres. The nearest intelligence is a soaring redtailed hawk. Other than the bird, no one notices them but them. Again, he walks. And he asks the boys, "Why did PS do it?" "He was selfish," says John. Blurts John. "Who told you that?" Houston responds. Then he makes himself laugh, adding, "That's right. Everyone says that he was horribly, wickedly selfish. Don't they?" From behind, Troy asks, "Were you?" "In a sense. Of course. Who isn't?" At the base of the hill is a little stand of trees. Ash trees, mostly. With an enormous and stately cottonwood anchoring one end. "But maybe there's a different answer. A harder, truer one." "Like what?" asks Mike. "All of you are Phillip's gift to the world." Houston slows his gait, making sure that everyone can hear. "The man had certain talents that can prosper in any time, and he decided to share those talents with his species. To enrich your generation with his genes, and when you have your own children, then enrich every generation to come." Mike snorts, in disgust. "What's the matter?" Houston asks. "Don't you approve?" The boy just shakes his head, glowering at the ground. For the last time, Troy looks over his shoulder. Then Houston places a hand on his shoulder, warning him, "Nobody knows where we are. For a little while, nobody's going to interrupt us. So don't worry. Okay?" The eyes are wide and sorrowful, but Troy says nothing. Then they move beneath the trees, out of the wind, their voices carrying and the mood instantly more intimate. More familiar. Houston says, "There's a third possibility." "What?" squeaks John.

"That Phillip Stevens remembered his childhood too well. He remembered his loneliness and how very separate he felt from the other kids. A bastard, interracial child without any father ... and maybe all of his plotting and his selfish evil was simply to make certain that the next time around ... that he wouldn't grow up so alone...." Now Houston cries. Sobbing, practically. Mike is unimpressed. He starts to turn away, announcing, "I don't want to do this shit any more. I'm going back to the car." "Please don't," Houston pleads. "I want to show you something first. Something important." Curiosity is the richest, sweetest drug. One after another, the boys nod in identical fashions and follow, their mentor leading them under the giant cottonwood. Head-high on the trunk is a distinctive X-shaped scar, the thick bark chopped open with a heavy blade. With his back to the scar, Houston starts to count his steps from the trunk. At a dozen, he stops. Kneels. And while tugging at the shade-starved grasses, he tells them, "Always remember. Being smart only means that you make bigger, louder mistakes." The boys stand as close together as they have ever been. Watching him. "With the PS bug," explains Houston, "I assumed that only a few thousand women inside a very limited region would catch it. That's all. A minimal plague and nobody would die...and when it was otherwise, believe me, there wasn't anyone more surprised than me." For an instant, Houston wonders if maybe this is the wrong place. Or perhaps he's really Houston Cross, and he is simply delusional. A pure crazy man. But then one tuft of grass gives on the first tug, then lets itself be uprooted with a hard yank. Beneath it is a pipe with a false bottom. He reaches elbow-deep and touches the bottom, the Swiss-made lock recognizing his fingertips. "I was shocked by the disease's scope," he confesses. "And horrified. And very sorry." The packets of money are pushed up by a gentle gas-powered piston. Hundred dollar bills create a little wall in the grass, and every boy has to step closer and gawk, Mike saying, "God, that's a lot!" "A few hundred thousand. That's all." Troy says, "Shit," under his breath. The others laugh, for just a moment. "And this is twenty million dollars," Houston adds, showing them an e-card that couldn't be more nondescript. "Untraceable, in theory. Although I haven't used it in years."

"What else is there? ..." one of them asks. He isn't sure who. Bending low, reaching into the damp hole, he tells them, "This. This is what I wanted to show you." Exactly the size of the piston beneath it, the disc is silvery and outdated by the latest technologies. But it's still readable, and probably will be for a few more years. John asks, "What's that?" "When I realized the scope of my plague," says Houston, "I made a nearly full list of the PS's. Birth dates and addresses and important government IDs. Everything that you would need to make contact with them. In this country, and everywhere else." "But that's all old now," Mike points out. "A lot of these boys have already died. You're right." He looks at them, one after another. Then he lets them watch as he shoves the cash back into its hiding place, leaving it unlocked, and fits the hat of sod and grass back into the pipe. "Others have moved. But if you're going to get in touch with them, you'll need to start somewhere." None of the boys can manage a word, watching him. Houston flips the disc toward John, then says, "If you need, come get this cash. But only as you need it." Mike bends and picks up the disc, then asks, "What are we supposed to do? Mr. Whoever-You-Are? ..." "Dr. Stevens," Troy tells him. "Organize your brothers. The sooner, the better." Houston stands and pockets the e-cash, then in the gravest voice he can summon, he tells them, "Things are going to get very bad, and probably before you're ready. But I know you. And I don't mean that you're just new incarnations of me. I know you as John and Mike and Troy. Together, you and the other boys are going to survive this mess that I selfishly made for you...." Then, he gasps for air. John asks, "What about you? Can't you stay and help us?" Mike says, "I don't want him here." Houston agrees. "I think they already suspect that I'm not Houston Cross. If they find out everything, then things will just be worse for you. Which is why you can't tell a soul about me. Ever." Only John nods with conviction. "But I plan to help you," he adds. "Later, when I've settled down again, I'll feed you advice, somehow. And if you need it, more money ..."

For a long moment, no one speaks. Then finally, with a quiet sorry voice, Houston says, "Five minutes. Give me that much time. Then walk back to the main road and wait until someone comes looking for you." He turns, taking his first tentative step toward the car. "What'll you do now?" asks Mike. Houston isn't sure. Maybe he should slip into another autographing ... this time with a copy of The Cuckoo's Boys, its pages laced with botulin toxins ... "What you should do," Mike says, "is shoot yourself. For real this time!" "Don't say that," John warns him. "Why not?" the smallest boy replies. "He's just a big fuck-up." Again, the grown man starts to cry. Troy says, "I had fun this year, Dr. Stevens. I did!" "Don't say awful things about our father!" John shouts. "He's not my father, and I'll say what I goddamn want to!" Mike replies. "Don't!" "Oh, fuck you!" With both hands and a hard deep grunt, John shoves Mike in the chest. The smaller boy stumbles and falls backward into the grass. Then for a moment, he does nothing. He just lays there, his face full of blood and a wild, careless anger. Then with his own grunt, he leaps up and runs, dropping his head as he slams into that big soft body, and both boys are throwing fists and cursing, then kicking each other, ribs bruised and lips bloodied before someone throws his body between them, screaming, "Now stop! Please, please, just grow up!" For a slippery instant, Mike wishes that it's Houston. Phillip. Whoever that prick is. Just so he can give him a few good smacks now. But no, it's just Troy. Poor stupid Troy is sobbing, and in his own way, he's furious. Then for some bizarre, twisted reason, Mike finds himself actually sorry that it wasn't the man who stops them. Wiping the gore out of his eyes, the boy looks across the prairie and sees no one. No one. Just the tall grass waving and the empty hillside, and the shit ran away again, and there's nobody else in the world but the three of them. That's when it starts to sink home. For all of them.

At long last. *** 14. There's no one like you in the world. People like to say otherwise, but they don't understand. Only people like ourselves understand. Each of us is more different than we are the same, and if you think about it, that's our best hope. Our only hope, maybe. For now, that's all we can tell you. But watch your mail, and watch for signs. Someday, sooner than you think, we'll talk again. We'll make our plans then. For anything and everything, we'll have to be ready. Sincerely, THE CUCKOO'S BOYS The Halfway House at the Heart of Darkness WILLIAM BROWNING SPENCER William Browning Spencer was born in Washington, D.C., and now lives in Austin Texas. His first novel, Maybe I'll Call Anna, was published in 1990 and won a New American Writing Award, and he has subsequently made quite a reputation for himself with quirky, eccentric, eclectic novels that dance on the borderlines between horror, fantasy, and black comedy, novels such as Résumé with Monsters and Zod Wallop. His short work has been collected in The Return of Count Electric and Other Stories. His most recent novel, Irrational Fears, was on the final ballot for the International Horror Guild Award, and he is at work on a new novel, a thriller entitled The Never After. His work has previously appeared in our Eleventh Annual Collection. In the fast-paced, free-wheeling, pyrotechnic story that follows, he shows us that there are as many ways to be saved as there are people to be saved ... and that often the most unexpected way is the way that works the best. Keel wore a ragged shirt with the holo veed there, simmed that shimmering on it. She wore it in and out of the virtual. If she was in an interactive virtual, the other players sometimes complained. Amid the dragons and elves and swords of fire, a bramble-haired girl, obviously spiking her virtual with drugs and refusing to tune her shirt to something suitably medieval, could be distracting. "Fizz off," Keel would say, in response to all complaints. Keel was difficult. Rich, self-destructive, beautiful, she was twenty years old and already a case study in virtual psychosis. She had been rehabbed six times. She could have died that time on Makor when she went blank in the

desert. She still bore the teeth marks of the land eels that were gnawing on her shoulder when they found her. A close one. You can't revive the digested. *** No one had to tell Keel that she was in rehab again. She was staring at a green ocean, huge white clouds overhead, white gulls filling the heated air with their cries. They gave you these serenity mock-ups when they were bringing you around. They were fairly insipid and several shouts behind the technology. This particular V-run was embarrassing. The ocean wasn't continuous, probably a seven-minute repeat, and the sun's heat was patchy on her face. The beach was empty. She was propped up in a lounge chair— no doubt her position back in the ward. With concentration, focusing on her spine, she could sense the actual contours of the bed, the satiny feel of the sensor pad. It was work, this focusing, and she let it go. Always better to flow. Far to her right, she spied a solitary figure. The figure was moving toward her. It was, she knew, a wilson. She was familiar with the drill. Don't spook the patient. Approach her slowly after she is sedated and in a quiet setting. The wilson was a fat man in a white suit (neo-Victorian, dead silly, Keel thought). He kept his panama hat from taking flight in the wind by clamping it onto his head with his right hand and leaning forward. Keel recognized him. She even remembered his name, but then it was the kind of name you'd remember: Dr. Max Marx. He had been her counselor, her wilson, the last time she'd crashed. Which meant she was in Addiction Resources Limited, which was located just outside of New Vegas. Dr. Marx looked up, waved, and came on again with new purpose. A pool of sadness welled in her throat. There was nothing like help, and its pale sister hope, to fill Keel's soul with black water. *** Fortunately, Dr. Max Marx wasn't one of the hearty ones. The hearty ones were the worst. Marx was, in fact, refreshingly gloomy, his thick black beard and eyebrows creating a doomed stoic's countenance. "Yes," he said, in response to her criticism of the virtual, "this is a very miserable effect. You should see the sand crabs. They are laughable, like toys." He eased himself down on the sand next to her and took his hat off and fanned it in front of his face. "I apologize. It must be very painful, a connoisseur of the vee

like you, to endure this." Keel remembered that Dr. Marx spoke in a manner subject to interpretation. His words always held a potential for sarcasm. "We are portable," Dr. Marx said, "we are in a mobile unit, and so, alas, we don't have the powerful stationary AdRes equipment at our command. Even so, we could do better, there are better mockups to be had, but we are not prospering these days. Financially, it has been a year of setbacks, and we have had to settle for some second-rate stuff." "I'm not in a hospital?" Keel asked. Marx shook his head. "No. No hospital." Keel frowned. Marx, sensing her confusion, put his hat back on his head and studied her through narrowed eyes. "We are on the run, Keel Benning. You have not been following the news, being otherwise occupied, but companies like your beloved Virtvana have won a major legislative battle. They are now empowered to maintain their customer base aggressively. I believe the wording is 'protecting customer assets against invasive alienation by third-party services.' Virtvana can come and get you." Keel blinked at Dr. Marx's dark countenance. "You can't seriously think someone would ... what? ... kidnap me?" Dr. Marx shrugged. "Virtvana might. For the precedent. You're a good customer." "Vee moguls are going to sweat the loss of one spike? That's crazy." Dr. Marx sighed, stood up, whacked sand from his trousers with his hands. "You noticed then? That's good. Being able to recognize crazy, that is a good sign. It means there is hope for your own sanity." *** Her days were spent at the edge of the second-rate ocean. She longed for something that would silence the Need. She would have settled for a primitive bird-in-flight simulation. Anything. Some corny sex-with-dolphins loop— or something abstract, the color red leaking into blue, enhanced with aural-D. She would have given ten years of her life for a game of Apes and Angels, Virtvana's most popular package. Apes and Angels wasn't just another smooth metaphysical mix— it was the true religion to its fans. A gamer started out down in the muck on Libido Island, where the senses were indulged with perfect, shimmerless sims. Not bad, Libido Island, and some gamers stayed there a long, long time. But what put Apes and Angels above the best pleasure pops was this: A player could evolve spiritually. If you followed the Path, if you were steadfast, you became more compassionate, more aware, at one with the universe ... all of which was accompanied by feelings of euphoria. Keel would have settled for a legal rig. Apes and Angels was a chemically enhanced virtual, and the gear that true believers wore was stripped of most safeguards, tuned to a higher reality. It was one of these hot pads that had landed Keel in Addiction Resources again.

"It's the street stuff that gets you in trouble," Keel said. "I've just got to stay clear of that." "You said that last time," the wilson said. "You almost died, you know." Keel felt suddenly hollowed, beaten. "Maybe I want to die," she said. Dr. Marx shrugged. Several translucent seagulls appeared, hovered over him, and then winked out. "Bah," he muttered. "Bad therapy-v, bad, death-wishing clients, bad career choice. Who doesn't want to die? And who doesn't get that wish, sooner or later?" *** One day, Dr. Marx said, "You are ready for swimming." It was morning, full of a phony, golden light. The nights were black and dreamless, nothing, and the days that grew out of them were pale and untaxing. It was an intentionally bland virtual, its sameness designed for healing. Keel was wearing a one-piece, white bathing suit. Her counselor wore bathing trunks, baggy with thick black vertical stripes; he looked particularly solemn, in an effort, no doubt, to counteract the farcical elements of rotund belly and sticklike legs. Keel sighed. She knew better than to protest. This was necessary. She took her wilson's proffered hand, and they walked down to the water's edge. The sand changed from white to gray where the water rolled over it, and they stepped forward into the salt-smelling foam. Her legs felt cold when the water enclosed them. The wetness was now more than virtual. As she leaned forward and kicked, her muscles, taut and frayed, howled. She knew the machines were exercising her now. Somewhere her real body, emaciated from long neglect, was swimming in a six-foot aquarium whose heavy seas circulated to create a kind of liquid treadmill. Her lungs ached; her shoulders twisted into monstrous knots of pain. *** In the evening, they would talk, sitting in their chairs and watching the ocean swallow the sun, the clouds turning orange, the sky occasionally spotting badly, some sort of pixel fatigue. "If human beings are the universe's way of looking at itself," Dr. Marx said, "then virtual reality is the universe's way of pretending to look at itself." "You wilsons are all so down on virtual reality," Keel said. "But maybe it is the natural evolution of perception. I mean, everything we see is a product of the equipment we see it with. Biological, mechanical, whatever." Dr. Marx snorted. "Bah. The old 'everything-is-virtual' argument. I am ashamed of you, Keel Benning.

Something more original, please. We wilsons are down on virtual addiction because everywhere we look we see dead philosophers. We see them and they don't look so good. We smell them, and they stink. That is our perception, our primitive reality." *** The healing was slow, and the sameness, the boredom, was a hole to be filled with words. Keel talked, again, about the death of her parents and her brother. They had been over this ground the last time she'd been in treatment, but she was here again, and so it was said again. "I'm rich because they are dead," she said. It was true, of course, and Dr. Marx merely nodded, staring in front of him. Her father had been a wealthy man, and he and his young wife and Keel's brother, Calder, had died in a freak air-docking accident while vacationing at Keypond Terraforms. A "sole survivor" clause in her father's life insurance policy had left Keel a vast sum. She had been eleven at the time— and would have died with her family had she not been sulking that day, refusing to leave the hotel suite. She knew she was not responsible, of course. But it was not an event you wished to dwell on. You looked, naturally, for powerful distractions. "It is a good excuse for your addiction," Dr. Marx said. "If you die, maybe God will say, 'I don't blame you.' Or maybe God will say, 'Get real. Life's hard.' I don't know. Addiction is in the present, not the past. It's the addiction itself that leads to more addictive behavior." Keel had heard all this before. She barely heard it this time. The weariness of the evening was real, brought on by the day's physical exertions. She spoke in a kind of woozy, presleep fog, finding no power in her words, no emotional release. Of more interest were her counselor's words. He spoke with rare candor, the result, perhaps, of their fugitive status, their isolation. It was after a long silence that he said, "To tell you the truth, I'm thinking of getting out of the addiction treatment business. I'm sick of being on the losing side." Keel felt a coldness in her then, which, later, she identified as fear. He continued: "They are winning. Virtvana, MindSlide, Right to Flight. They've got the sex, the style, the flash. All we wilsons have is a sense of mission, this knowledge that people are dying, and the ones that don't die are being lost to lives of purpose." "Maybe we're right— sure, we're right— but we can't sell it. In two, three days we'll come to our destination and you'll have to come into Big R and meet your fellow addicts. You won't be impressed. It's a henry-hovel in the Slash. It's not a terrific advertisement for Big R." Keel felt strange, comforting her wilson. Nonetheless, she reached forward and touched his bare

shoulder. "You want to help people. That is a good and noble impulse." He looked up at her, a curious nakedness in his eyes. "Maybe that is hubris." "Hubris?" "Are you not familiar with the word? It means to try to steal the work of the gods." Keel thought about that in the brief moment between the dimming of the seascape and the nothingness of night. She thought it would be a fine thing to do, to steal the work of the gods. *** Dr. Marx checked the perimeter, the security net. All seemed to be in order. The air was heavy with moisture and the cloying odor of mint. This mint scent was the olfactory love song of an insectlike creature that flourished in the tropical belt. The creature looked like an unpleasant mix of spider and wasp. Knowing that the sweet scent came from it, Dr. Marx breathed shallowly and had to fight against an inclination to gag. Interesting, the way knowledge affected one. An odor, pleasant in itself, could induce nausea when its source was identified. He was too weary to pursue the thought. He returned to the mobile unit, climbed in and locked the door behind him. He walked down the corridor, paused to peer into the room where Keel rested, sedated electrically. He should not have spoken his doubts. He was weary, depressed, and it was true that he might very well abandon this crumbling profession. But he had no right to be so self-revealing to a client. As long as he was employed, it behooved him to conduct himself in a professional manner. Keel's head rested quietly on the pillow. Behind her, on the green panels, her heart and lungs created cool, luminous graphics. Physically, she was restored. Emotionally, mentally, spiritually, she might be damaged beyond repair. He turned away from the window and walked on down the corridor. He walked past his sleeping quarters to the control room. He undressed and lay down on the utilitarian flat and let the neuronet embrace him. He was aware, as always, of guilt and a hangdog sense of betrayal. The virtual had come on the Highway two weeks ago. He'd already left Addiction Resources with Keel, traveling west into the wilderness of Pit Finitum, away from the treatment center and New Vegas. Know the enemy. He'd sampled all the vees, played at lowest res with all the safeguards maxed, so that he could talk knowledgeably with his clients. But he'd never heard of this virtual— and it had a special fascination for him. It was called Halfway House. A training vee, not a recreational one, it consisted of a series of step-motivated, instructional virtuals designed to teach the apprentice addictions counselor his trade. So why this guilt attached to methodically running the course?

What guilt? That guilt. Okay. Well ... *** The answer was simple enough: Here all interventions came to a good end, all problems were resolved, all clients were healed. So far he had intervened on a fourteen-year-old boy addicted to Clawhammer Comix, masterfully diagnosed a woman suffering from Leary's syndrome, and led an entire Group of mix-feeders through a nasty withdrawal episode. He could tell himself he was learning valuable healing techniques. Or he could tell himself that he was succumbing to the world that killed his clients, the hurt-free world where everything worked out for the best, good triumphed, bad withered and died, rewards came effortlessly— and if that was not enough, the volume could always be turned up. He had reservations. Adjusting the neuronet, he thought, "I will be careful." It was what his clients always said. *** Keel watched the insipid ocean, waited. Generally, Dr. Marx arrived soon after the darkness of sleep had fled. He did not come at all. When the sun was high in the sky, she began to shout for him. That was useless, of course. She ran into the ocean, but it was a low res ghost and only filled her with veepanic. She stumbled back to the beach chair, tried to calm herself with a rational voice: Someone will come. But would they? She was, according to her wilson, in the wilds of Pit Finitum, hundreds of miles to the west of New Vegas, traveling toward a halfway house hidden in some dirty corner of the mining warren known as the Slash. Darkness came, and the programmed current took her into unconsciousness. The second day was the same, although she sensed a physical weakness that emanated from Big R. Probably nutrients in one of the IV pockets had been depleted. I'll die, she thought. Night snuffed the thought. A new dawn arrived without Dr. Marx. Was he dead? And if so, was he dead by accident or design? And if by design, whose? Perhaps he had killed himself; perhaps this whole business of Virtvana's

persecution was a delusion. Keel remembered the wilson's despair, felt a sudden conviction that Dr. Marx had fled Addiction Resources without that center's knowledge, a victim of the evangelism/paranoia psychosis that sometimes accompanied counselor burnout. Keel had survived much in her twenty years. She had donned some deadly v-gear and made it back to Big R intact. True, she had been saved a couple of times, and she probably wasn't what anyone would call psychologically sound, but ... it would be an ugly irony if it was an addictions rehab, an unhinged wilson, that finally killed her. Keel hated irony, and it was this disgust that pressed her into action. She went looking for the plug. She began by focusing on her spine, the patches, the slightly off-body temp of the sensor pad. Had her v-universe been more engrossing, this would have been harder to do, but the ocean was deteriorating daily, the seagulls now no more than scissoring disruptions in the mottled sky. On the third afternoon of her imposed solitude, she was able to sit upright in Big R. It required all her strength, the double-think of real Big-R motion while in the virtual. The effect in vee was to momentarily tilt the ocean and cause the sky to leak blue pixels into the sand. Had her arms been locked, had her body been glove-secured, it would have been wasted effort, of course, but Keel's willing participation in her treatment, her daily exercise regimen, had allowed relaxed physical inhibitors. There had been no reason for Dr. Marx to anticipate Keel's attempting a Big-R disruption. She certainly didn't want to. The nausea and terror induced by contrary motion in Big R while simulating a virtual was considerable. Keel relied on gravity, shifting, leaning to the right. The bed shifted to regain balance. She screamed, twisted, hurled herself sideways into Big R. And her world exploded. The ocean raced up the beach, a black tidal wave that screeched and rattled as though some monstrous mechanical beast were being demolished by giant pistons. Black water engulfed her. She coughed and it filled her lungs. She flayed; her right fist slammed painfully against the side of the container, making it hum. She clambered out of the exercise vat, placed conveniently next to the bed, stumbled, and sprawled on the floor in naked triumph. "Hello Big R," she said, tasting blood on her lips. ***

Dr. Marx had let the system ease him back into Big R. The sessions room dimmed to glittering black, then the light returned. He was back in the bright control room. He removed the neuronet, swung his legs to the side of the flatbed, stretched. It had been a good session. He had learned something about distinguishing (behaviorially) the transitory feedback psychosis called frets from the organic v-disease, Viller's Pathway. This Halfway House was proving to be a remarkable instructional tool. In retrospect, his fear of its virtual form had been pure superstition. He smiled at his own irrationality. *** He would have slept that night in ignorance, but he decided to give the perimeter of his makeshift compound a last security check before retiring. To that effect, he dressed and went outside. In the flare of the compound lights, the jungle's purple vegetation looked particularly unpleasant, like the swollen limbs of long-drowned corpses. The usual skittering things made a racket. There was nothing in the area inclined to attack a man, but the planet's evolution hadn't stinted on biting and stinging vermin, and ... And one of the vermin was missing. He had, as always, been frugal in his breathing, gathering into his lungs as little of the noxious atmosphere as possible. The cloying mint scent never failed to sicken him. But the odor was gone. It had been there earlier in the evening, and now it was gone. He stood in jungle night, in the glare of the compound lights, waiting for his brain to process this piece of information, but his brain told him only that the odor had been there and now it was gone. Still, some knowledge of what this meant was leaking through, creating a roiling fear. If you knew what to look for, you could find it. No vee was as detailed as nature. You only had to find one seam, one faint oscillation in a rock, one incongruent shadow. It was a first-rate sim, and it would have fooled him. But they had had to work fast, fabricating and downloading it, and no one had noted that a nasty alien-bug filled the Big-R air with its mating fragrance. *** Dr. Marx knew he was still in the vee. That meant, of course, that he had not walked outside at all. He was still lying on the flat. And, thanks to his blessed paranoia, there was a button at the base of the flat, two inches from where his left hand naturally lay. Pushing it would disrupt all current and activate a hypodermic containing twenty cc's of hapotile-4. Hapotile-4 could get the attention of the deepest

v-diver. The aftereffects were not pleasant, but, for many v-devotees, there wouldn't have been an "after" without hapotile. Dr. Marx didn't hesitate. He strained for the Big R, traced the line of his arm, moved. It was there; he found it. Pressed. Nothing. Then, out of the jungle, a figure came. *** Eight feet tall, carved from black steel, the vee soldier bowed at the waist. Then, standing erect, it spoke: "We deactivated your failsafe before you embarked, Doctor." "Who are you?" He was not intimidated by this military mockup, the boom of its metal voice, the faint whine of its servos. It was a virtual puppet, of course. Its masters were the thing to fear. "We are concerned citizens," the soldier said. "We have reason to believe that you are preventing a client of ours, a client-in-good-credit, from satisfying her constitutionally sanctioned appetites." "Keel Benning came to us of her own free will. Ask her and she will tell you as much." "We will ask her. And that is not what she will say. She will say, for all the world to hear, that her freedom was compromised by so-called caregivers." "Leave her alone." The soldier came closer. It looked up at the dark blanket of the sky. "Too late to leave anyone alone, Doctor. Everyone is in the path of progress. One day we will all live in the vee. It is the natural home of gods." The sky began to glow as the black giant raised its gleaming arms. "You act largely out of ignorance," the soldier said. "The god-seekers come, and you treat them like aberrations, like madmen burning with sickness. This is because you do not know the virtual yourself. Fearing it, you have confined and studied it. You have refused to taste it, to savor it." The sky was glowing gold, and figures seemed to move in it, beautiful, winged humanforms. Virtvana, Marx thought. Ape and Angels. It was his last coherent thought before enlightenment. "I give you a feast," the soldier roared. And all the denizens of heaven swarmed down, surrounding Dr. Marx with love and compassion and that absolute, impossible distillation of a hundred thousand insights that formed a single, tear-shaped truth: Euphoria.

*** Keel found she could stand. A couple of days of inaction hadn't entirely destroyed the work of all that exercise. Shakily, she navigated the small room. The room had the sanitized, hospital look she'd grown to know and loathe. If this room followed the general scheme, the shelves over the bed should contain ... They did, and Keel donned one of the gray, disposable client suits. *** She found Dr. Marx by the noise he was making, a kind of huh, huh, huh delivered in a monotonous chant and punctuated by an occasional Ah! The sounds, and the writhing, near-naked body that lay on the table emitting these sounds, suggested to Keel that her doctor, naughty man, might be auditing something sexual on the virtual. But a closer look showed signs of v-overload epilepsy. Keel had seen it before and knew that one's first inclination, to shut down every incoming signal, was not the way to go. First you shut down any chemical enhances— and, if you happened to have a hospital handy (as she did), you slowed the system more with something like clemadine or hetlin— then, if you were truly fortunate and your spike was epping in a high-tech detox (again, she was so fortunate), you plugged in a regulator, spliced it and started running the signals through that, toning them down. Keel got to it. As she moved, quickly, confidently, she had time to think that this was something she knew about (a consumer's knowledge, not a tech's, but still, her knowledge was extensive). *** Dr. Marx had been freed from the virtual for approximately ten minutes (but was obviously not about to break the surface of Big R), when Keel heard the whine of the security alarm. The front door of the unit was being breached with an L-saw. Keel scrambled to the corridor where she'd seen the habitat sweep. She swung the ungainly tool around, falling to one knee as she struggled to unbolt the barrel lock. Fizzing pocky low-tech grubber. The barrel-locking casing clattered to the floor just as the door collapsed. The man in the doorway held a weapon, which, in retrospect, made Keel feel a little better. Had he been weaponless, she would still have done what she did. She swept him out the door. The sonic blast scattered him across the cleared area, a tumbling, bloody mass of rags and unraveling flesh, a thigh bone tumbling into smaller bits as it rolled under frayed vegetation. She was standing in the doorway when an explosion rocked the unit and sent her crashing backward. She crawled down the corridor, still lugging the habitat gun, and fell into the doorway of a cluttered storage room. An alarm continued to shriek somewhere.

The mobile now lay on its side. She fired in front of her. The roof rippled and roared, looked like it might hold, and then flapped away like an unholy, howling v-demon, a vast silver blade that smoothly severed the leafy tops of the jungle's tallest sentinels. Keel plunged into the night, ran to the edge of the unit and peered out into the glare of the compound lights. The man was crossing the clearing. She crouched, and he turned, sensing motion. He was trained to fire reflexively but he was too late. The rolling sonic blast from Keel's habitat gun swept man and weapon and weapon's discharge into rolling motes that mixed with rock and sand and vegetation, a stew of organic and inorganic matter for the wind to stir. Keel waited for others to come but none did. Finally, she reentered the mobile to retrieve her wilson, dragging him (unconscious) into the scuffed arena of the compound. Later that night, exhausted, she discovered the aircraft that had brought the two men. She hesitated, then decided to destroy it. It would do her no good; it was not a vehicle she could operate, and its continued existence might bring others. *** The next morning, Keel's mood improved when she found a pair of boots that almost fit. They were a little tight but, she reasoned, that was probably better than a little loose. They had, according to Dr. Marx, a four-day trek ahead of them. Dr. Marx was now conscious but fairly insufferable. He could talk about nothing but angels and the Light. A long, hard dose of Apes and Angels had filled him with fuzzy love and an uncomplicated metaphysics in which smiling angels fixed bad stuff and protected all good people (and, it went without saying, all people were good). Keel had managed to dress Dr. Marx in a suit again, and this restored a professional appearance to the wilson. But, to Keel's dismay, Dr. Marx in virtual-withdrawal was a shameless whiner. "Please," he would implore. "Please, I am in terrible terrible Neeeeeeed." He complained that the therapy-v was too weak, that he was sinking into a catatonic state. Later, he would stop entirely, of course, but now, please, something stronger ... No. He told her she was heartless, cruel, sadistic, vengeful. She was taking revenge for her own treatment program, although, if she would just recall, he had been the soul of gentleness and solicitude. "You can't be in virtual and make the journey," Keel said. "I need you to navigate. We will take breaks, but I'm afraid they will be brief. Say goodbye to your mobile."

She destroyed it with the habitat sweep, and they were on their way. It was a limping, difficult progress, for they took much with them: food, emergency camping and sleeping gear, a portable, two-feed v-rig, the virtual black box, and the security image grabs. And Dr. Marx was not a good traveler. It took six days to get to the Slash, and then Dr. Marx said he wasn't sure just where the halfway house was. "What?" "I don't know. I'm disoriented." "You'll never be a good v-addict," Keel said. "You can't lie." "I'm not lying!" Dr. Marx snapped, goggle-eyed with feigned innocence. Keel knew what was going on, of course. He wanted to give her the slip and find a v-hovel where he could swap good feelings with his old angel buddies. Keel knew. "I'm not letting you out of my sight," she said. The Slash was a squalid mining town with every vice a disenfranchised population could buy. It had meaner toys than New Vegas, and no semblance of law. Keel couldn't just ask around for a treatment house. You could get hurt that way. But luck was with her. She spied the symbol of a triangle inside a circle on the side of what looked like an abandoned office. She watched a man descend a flight of stairs directly beneath the painted triangle. She followed him. "Where are we going?" Dr. Marx said. He was still a bundle of tics from angel-deprivation. Keel didn't answer, just dragged him along. Inside, she saw the "Easy Does It" sign and knew everything was going to be okay. An old man saw her and waved. Incredibly, he knew her, even knew her name. "Keel," he shouted. "I'm delighted to see you." "It's a small world, Solly." "It's that. But you get around some too. You cover some ground, you know. I figured ground might be covering you by now." Keel laughed. "Yeah." She reached out and touched the old man's arm. "I'm looking for a house," she said. *** In Group they couldn't get over it. Dr. Max Marx was a fizzing client. This amazed everyone, but two

identical twins, Sere and Shona, were so dazed by this event that they insisted on dogging the wilson's every move. They'd flank him, peering up into his eyes, trying to fathom this mystery by an act of unrelenting scrutiny. Brake Madders thought it was a narc thing and wanted to hurt Marx. "No, he's one of us," Keel said. And so, Keel thought, am I. *** When Dr. Max Marx was an old man, one of his favorite occupations was to reminisce. One of his favorite topics was Keel Benning. He gave her credit for saving his life, not only in the jungles of Pit Finitum but during the rocky days that followed when he wanted to flee the halfway house and find, again, virtual nirvana. She had recognized every denial system and thwarted it with logic. When logic was not enough, she had simply shared his sadness and pain and doubt. "I've been there," she had said. *** The young wilsons and addiction activists knew Keel Benning only as the woman who had fought Virtvana and MindSlip and the vast lobby of Right to Flight, the woman who had secured a resounding victory for addicts' rights and challenged the spurious thinking that suggested a drowning person was drowning by choice. She was a hero, but, like many heroes, she was not, to a newer generation, entirely real. *** "I was preoccupied at the time," Dr. Marx would tell young listeners. "I kept making plans to slip out and find some Apes and Angels. You weren't hard pressed then— and you aren't now— to find some mind-flaming vee in the Slack. My thoughts would go that way a lot." "So I didn't stop and think, 'Here's a woman who's been rehabbed six times; it's not likely she'll stop on the seventh. She's just endured some genuine nasty events, and she's probably feeling the need for some quality downtime.' "What I saw was a woman who spent every waking moment working on her recovery. And when she wasn't doing mental, spiritual, or physical pushups she was helping those around her, all us shaking, vision-hungry, fizz-headed needers. "I didn't think, 'What the hell is this?' back then. But I thought it later. I thought it when I saw her graduate

from medical school." "When she went back and got a law degree, so she could fight the bastards who wouldn't let her practice addiction medicine properly, I thought it again. That time, I asked her. I asked her what had wrought the change." Dr. Marx would wait as long as it took for someone to ask, "What did she say?" "It unsettled me some," he would say, then wait again to be prompted. They'd prompt. " 'Helping people,' she'd said. She'd found it was a thing she could do, she had a gift for it. All those no-counts and dead-enders in a halfway house in the Slack. She found she could help them all." Dr. Marx saw it then, and saw it every time after that, every time he'd seen her speaking on some monolith grid at some rally, some hearing, some whatever. Once he'd seen it, he saw it every time: that glint in her eye, the incorrigible, unsinkable addict. "People," she had said. "What a rush." The Very Pulse of the Machine MICHAEL SWANWICK Michael Swanwick made his debut in 1980, and in the nineteen years that have followed has established himself as one of SF's most prolific and consistently excellent writers at short lengths, as well as one of the premier novelists of his generation. He has several times been a finalist for the Nebula Award, as well as for the World Fantasy Award and for the John W. Campbell Award, and has won the Theodore Sturgeon Award and the Asimov's Readers Award poll. In 1991, his novel Stations of the Tide won him a Nebula Award as well, and in 1995 he won the World Fantasy Award for his story "Radio Waves." His other books include his first novel, In the Drift, which was published in 1985, a novella-length book Griffin's Egg, 1987's popular novel Vacuum Flowers, and a critically acclaimed fantasy novel The Iron Dragon's Daughter, which was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award (a rare distinction!). His most recent novel, Jack Faust, a sly reworking of the Faust legend that explores the unexpected impact of technology on society, has garnered rave reviews from nearly every source from The Washington Post to Interzone. His short fiction has been assembled in Gravity's Angels and in a collection of his collaborative short work with other writers, Slow Dancing Through Time. His most recent books are a collection of critical essays, The Postmodern Archipelago, and a new collection A Geography of Unknown Lands, and he's currently at work on a new novel. He's had stories in our Second, Third, Fourth, Sixth, Seventh, Tenth, Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Annual Collections. Swanwick lives in Philadelphia with his wife, Marianne Porter, and their son, Sean, who willfully continues to be taller than either of them, although they frequently reproach him for it. Here he takes us across the solar system to the tortured, molten, ever-changing surface of Io, for a close encounter of a unique and surprising kind....

Click. The radio came on. "Hell." Martha kept her eyes forward, concentrated on walking. Jupiter to one shoulder, Daedalus's plume to the other. Nothing to it. Just trudge, drag, trudge, drag. Piece of cake. "Oh." She chinned the radio off. Click. "Hell. Oh. Kiv. El. Sen." "Shut up, shut up, shut up!" Martha gave the rope an angry jerk, making the sledge carrying Burton's body jump and bounce on the sulfur hardpan. "You're dead, Burton. I've checked, there is a hole in your faceplate big enough to stick a fist through, and I really don't want to crack up. I'm in kind of a tight spot here and I can't afford it, okay? So be nice and just shut the fuck up." "Not. Bur. Ton." "Do it anyway." She chinned the radio off again. Jupiter loomed low on the western horizon, big and bright and beautiful and, after two weeks on Io, easy to ignore. To her left, Daedalus was spewing sulfur and sulfur dioxide in a fan two hundred kilometers high. The plume caught the chill light from an unseen sun and her visor rendered it a pale and lovely blue. Most spectacular view in the universe, and she was in no mood to enjoy it. Click. Before the voice could speak again, Martha said, "I am not going crazy, you're just the voice of my subconscious, I don't have the time to waste trying to figure out what unresolved psychological conflicts gave rise to all this, and I am not going to listen to anything you have to say." Silence. *** The moonrover had flipped over at least five times before crashing sideways against a boulder the size of the Sydney Opera House. Martha Kivelsen, timid groundling that she was, was strapped into her seat so tightly that when the universe stopped tumbling, she'd had a hard time unlatching the restraints. Juliet Burton, tall and athletic, so sure of her own luck and agility that she hadn't bothered, had been thrown

into a strut. The vent-blizzard of sulfur dioxide snow was blinding, though. It was only when Martha had finally crawled out from under its raging whiteness that she was able to look at the suited body she'd dragged free of the wreckage. She immediately turned away. Whatever knob or flange had punched the hole in Burton's helmet had been equally ruthless with her head. Where a fraction of the vent-blizzard—"lateral plumes" the planetary geologists called them— had been deflected by the boulder, a bank of sulfur dioxide snow had built up. Automatically, without thinking, Martha scooped up double-handfuls and packed them into the helmet. Really, it was a nonsensical thing to do; in a vacuum, the body wasn't about to rot. On the other hand, it hid that face. Then Martha did some serious thinking. For all the fury of the blizzard, there was no turbulence. Because there was no atmosphere to have turbulence in. The sulfur dioxide gushed out straight from the sudden crack that had opened in the rock, falling to the surface miles away in strict obedience to the laws of ballistics. Most of what struck the boulder they'd crashed against would simply stick to it and the rest would be bounced down to the ground at its feet. So that— this was how she'd gotten out in the first place— it was possible to crawl under the near-horizontal spray and back to the ruins of the moonrover. If she went slowly, the helmet light and her sense of feel ought to be sufficient for a little judicious salvage. Martha got down on her hands and knees. And as she did, just as quickly as the blizzard had begun— it stopped. She stood, feeling strangely foolish. Still, she couldn't rely on the blizzard staying quiescent. Better hurry, she admonished herself. It might be an intermittent. Quickly, almost fearfully, picking through the rich litter of wreckage, Martha discovered that the mother tank they used to replenish their air-packs had ruptured. Terrific. That left her own pack, which was one-third empty, two fully charged backup packs, and Burton's, also one-third empty. It was a ghoulish thing to strip Burton's suit of her airpack, but it had to be done. Sorry, Julie. That gave her enough oxygen to last, let's see, almost forty hours. Then she took a curved section of what had been the moonrover's hull and a coil of nylon rope, and with two pieces of scrap for makeshift hammer and punch, fashioned a sledge for Burton's body. She'd be damned if she was going to leave it behind. *** Click.

"This is. Better." "Says you." Ahead of her stretched the hard, cold sulfur plain. Smooth as glass. Brittle as frozen toffee. Cold as hell. She called up a visor-map and checked her progress. Only forty-five miles of mixed terrain to cross and she'd reach the lander. Then she'd be home free. No sweat, she thought. Io was in tidal lock with Jupiter. So the Father of Planets would stay glued to one fixed spot in the sky. That was as good as a navigation beacon. Just keep Jupiter to your right shoulder, and Daedalus to your left. You'll come out fine. "Sulfur is. Triboelectric." "Don't hold it in. What are you really trying to say?" "And now I see. With eye serene. The very. Pulse. Of the machine." A pause. "Wordsworth." Which, except for the halting delivery, was so much like Burton, with her classical education and love of classical poets like Spenser and Ginsberg and Plath, that for a second Martha was taken aback. Burton was a terrible poetry bore, but her enthusiasm had been genuine, and now Martha was sorry for every time she'd met those quotations with rolled eyes or a flip remark. But there's be time enough for grieving later. Right now she had to concentrate on the task at hand. The colors of the plain were dim and brownish. With a few quick chintaps, she cranked up their intensity. Her vision filled with yellows, oranges, reds— intense wax crayon colors. Martha decided she liked them best that way. For all its Crayola vividness, this was the most desolate landscape in the universe. She was on her own here, small and weak in a harsh and unforgiving world. Burton was dead. There was nobody else on all of Io. Nobody to rely on but herself. Nobody to blame if she fucked up. Out of nowhere, she was filled with an elation as cold and bleak as the distant mountains. It was shameful how happy she felt. After a minute, she said, "Know any songs?" *** Oh the bear went over the mountain. The bear went over the mountain. The bear went over the mountain. To see what he could see. "Wake. Up. Wake. Up." To see what he could— "Wake. Up. Wake. Up. Wake." "Hah? What?" "Crystal sulfur is orthorhombic."

She was in a field of sulfur flowers. They stretched as far as the eye could see, crystalline formations the size of her hand. Like the poppies of Flanders field. Or the ones in The Wizard of Oz. Behind her was a trail of broken flowers, some crushed by her feet or under the weight of the sledge, others simply exploded by exposure to her suit's waste heat. It was far from being a straight path. She had been walking on autopilot, and stumbled and turned and wandered upon striking the crystals. Martha remembered how excited she and Burton had been when they first saw the fields of crystals. They had piled out of the moonrover with laughter and bounding leaps, and Burton had seized her by the waist and waltzed her around in a dance of jubilation. This was the big one, they'd thought, their chance at the history books. And even when they'd radioed Hols back in the orbiter and were somewhat condescendingly informed that there was no chance of this being a new life-form, but only sulfide formations such as could be found in any mineralogy text ... even that had not killed their joy. It was still their first big discovery. They'd looked forward to many more. Now, though, all she could think of was the fact that such crystal fields occurred in regions associated with sulfur geysers, lateral plumes, and volcanic hot spots. Something funny was happening to the far edge of the field, though. She cranked up her helmet to extreme magnification and watched as the trail slowly erased itself. New flowers were rising up in place of those she had smashed, small but perfect and whole. And growing. She could not imagine by what process this could be happening. Electrodeposition? Molecular sulfur being drawn up from the soil in some kind of pseudocapillary action? Were the flowers somehow plucking sulfur ions from Io's almost nonexistent atmosphere? Yesterday, the questions would have excited her. Now, her capacity for wonder was nonexistent. Moreover, her instruments were back in the moonrover. Save for the suit's limited electronics, she had nothing to take measurements with. She had only herself, the sledge, the spare airpacks, and the corpse. "Damn, damn, damn," she muttered. On the one hand, this was a dangerous place to stay in. On the other, she'd been awake almost twenty hours now and she was dead on her feet. Exhausted. So very, very tired. "O sleep! It is a gentle thing. Beloved from pole to pole. Coleridge." Which, God knows, was tempting. But the numbers were clear: no sleep. With several deft chin-taps, Martha overrode her suit's safeties and accessed its medical kit. At her command, it sent a hit of methamphetamine rushing down the drug/vitamin catheter. There was a sudden explosion of clarity in her skull and her heart began pounding like a jackhammer. Yeah. That did it. She was full of energy now. Deep breath. Long stride. Let's go. No rest for the wicked. She had things to do. She left the flowers rapidly behind. Good-bye, Oz. *** Fade out. Fade in. Hours had glided by. She was walking through a shadowy sculpture garden. Volcanic pillars (these were their second great discovery; they had no exact parallel on Earth) were scattered

across the pyroclastic plain like so many isolated Lipschitz statues. They were all rounded and heaped, very much in the style of rapidly cooled magma. Martha remembered that Burton was dead, and cried quietly to herself for a few minutes. Weeping, she passed through the eerie stone forms. The speed made them shift and move in her vision. As if they were dancing. They looked like women to her, tragic figures out of The Bacchae or, no, wait, The Trojan Women was the play she was thinking of. Desolate. Filled with anguish. Lonely as Lot's wife. There was a light scattering of sulfur dioxide snow on the ground here. It sublimed at the touch of her boots, turning to white mist and scattering wildly, the steam disappearing with each stride and then being renewed with the next footfall. Which only made the experience all that much creepier. Click. "Io has a metallic core predominantly of iron and iron sulfide, overlain by a mantle of partially molten rock and crust." "Are you still here?" "Am trying. To communicate." "Shut up." She topped the ridge. The plains ahead were smooth and undulating. They reminded her of the Moon, in the transitional region between Mare Serenitatis and the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains, where she had undergone her surface training. Only without the impact craters. No impact craters on Io. Least cratered solid body in the solar system. All that volcanic activity deposited a new surface one meter thick every millennium or so. The whole damned moon was being constantly repaved. Her mind was rambling. She checked her gauges, and muttered, "Let's get this show on the road." There was no reply. Dawn would come— when? Let's work this out. Io's "year," the time it took to revolve about Jupiter, was roughly forty-two hours fifteen minutes. She'd been walking seven hours. During which Io would've moved roughly sixty degrees through its orbit. So it would be dawn soon. That would make Daedalus's plume less obvious, but with her helmet graphics that wouldn't be a worry. Martha swiveled her neck, making sure that Daedalus and Jupiter were where they ought to be, and kept on walking. *** Trudge, trudge, trudge. Try not to throw the map up on the visor every five minutes. Hold off as long as you can, just one more hour, okay, that's good, and another two miles. Not too shabby. The sun was getting high. It would be noon in another hour and a half. Which meant— well, it really didn't mean much of anything.

Rock up ahead. Probably a silicate. It was a solitary six meters high brought here by who knew what forces and waiting who knew how many thousands of years just for her to come along and need a place to rest. She found a flat spot where she could lean against it, and, breathing heavily, sat down to rest. And think. And check the airpack. Four hours until she had to change it again. Bringing her down to two airpacks. She had slightly under twenty-four hours now. Thirty-five miles to go. That was less than two miles an hour. A snap. Might run a little tight on oxygen there toward the end, though. She'd have to take care she didn't fall asleep. Oh, how her body ached. It ached almost as much as it had in the '48 Olympics, when she'd taken the bronze in the women's marathon. Or that time in the internationals in Kenya when she'd come up from behind to tie for second. Story of her life. Always in third place, fighting for second. Always flight crew and sometimes, maybe, landing crew, but never the commander. Never class president. Never king of the hill. Just once— once!— she wanted to be Neil Armstrong. Click. "The marble index of a mind forever. Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone. Wordsworth." "What?" "Jupiter's magnetosphere is the largest thing in the solar system. If the human eye could see it, it would appear two and a half times wider in the sky than the sun does." "I knew that," she said, irrationally annoyed. "Quotation is. Easy. Speech is. Not." "Don't speak, then." "Trying. To communicate!" She shrugged. "So go ahead— communicate." Silence. Then, "What does. This. Sound like?" "What does what sound like?" "Io is a sulfur-rich, iron-cored moon in a circular orbit around Jupiter. What does this. Sound like? Tidal forces from Jupiter and Ganymede pull and squeeze Io sufficiently to melt Tartarus, its sub-surface sulfur ocean. Tartarus vents its excess energy with sulfur and sulfur dioxide volcanoes. What does. This sound like? Io's metallic core generates a magnetic field that punches a hole in Jupiter's magnetosphere, and also creates a high-energy ion flux tube connecting its own poles with the north and south poles of Jupiter. What. Does this sound like? Io sweeps up and absorbs all the electrons in the million-volt range. Its volcanoes pump out sulfur dioxide; its magnetic field breaks down a percentage of that into sulfur and oxygen ions; and these ions are pumped into the hole punched in the magnetosphere, creating a rotating field commonly called the Io torus. What does this sound like? Torus. Flux tube. Magnetosphere. Volcanoes. Sulfur ions. Molten ocean. Tidal heating. Circular orbit. What does this sound like?"

Against her will, Martha had found herself first listening, then intrigued, and finally involved. It was like a riddle or a word-puzzle. There was a right answer to the question. Burton or Hols would have gotten it immediately. Martha had to think it through. There was the faint hum of the radio's carrier beam. A patient, waiting noise. At last, she cautiously said, "It sounds like a machine." "Yes. Yes. Yes. Machine. Yes. Am machine. Am machine. Am machine. Yes. Yes. Machine. Yes." "Wait. You're saying that Io is a machine? That you're a machine? That you're Io?" "Sulfur is triboelectric. Sledge picks up charges. Burton's brain is intact. Language is data. Radio is medium. Am machine." "I don't believe you." *** Trudge, drag, trudge, drag. The world doesn't stop for strangeness. Just because she'd gone loopy enough to think that Io was alive and a machine and talking to her, didn't mean that Martha could stop walking. She had promises to keep, and miles to go before she slept. And speaking of sleep, it was time for another fast refresher— just a quarter-hit— of speed. Wow. Let's go! As she walked, she continued to carry on a dialogue with her hallucination or delusion or whatever it was. It was too boring otherwise. Boring, and a tiny bit terrifying. So she asked, "If you're a machine, then what is your function? Why were you made?" "To know you. To love you. And to serve you." Martha blinked. Then, remembering Burton's long reminiscences on her Catholic girlhood, she laughed. That was a paraphrase of the answer to the first question in the old Baltimore Catechism: Why did God make man? "If I keep on listening to you, I'm going to come down with delusions of grandeur." "You are. Creator. Of machine." "Not me." She walked on without saying anything for a time. Then, because the silence was beginning to get to her again, "When was it I supposedly created you?" "So many a million of ages have gone. To the making of man. Alfred, Lord Tennyson."

"That wasn't me, then. I'm only twenty-seven. You're obviously thinking of somebody else." "It was. Mobile. Intelligent. Organic. Life. You are. Mobile. Intelligent. Organic. Life." Something moved in the distance. Martha looked up, astounded. A horse. Pallid and ghostly white, it galloped soundlessly across the plains, tail and mane flying. She squeezed her eyes tight and shook her head. When she opened her eyes again, the horse was gone. A hallucination. Like the voice of Burton/Io. She'd been thinking of ordering up another refresher of the meth, but now it seemed best to put it off as long as possible. This was sad, though. Inflating Burton's memories until they were as large as Io. Freud would have a few things to say about that. He'd say she was magnifying her friend to a godlike status in order to justify the fact that she'd never been able to compete one-on-one with Burton and win. He'd say she couldn't deal with the fact that some people were simply better at things than she was. Trudge, drag, trudge, drag. So, okay, yes, she had an ego problem. She was an overambitious, self-centered bitch. So what? It had gotten her this far, where a more reasonable attitude would have left her back in the slums of greater Levittown. Making do with an eight-by-ten room with bathroom rights and a job as a dental assistant. Kelp and talapia every night, and rabbit on Sunday. The hell with that. She was alive and Burton wasn't— by any rational standard that made her the winner. "Are you. Listening?" "Not really, no." She topped yet another rise. And stopped dead. Down below was a dark expanse of molten sulfur. It stretched, wide and black, across the streaked orange plains. A lake. Her helmet readouts ran a thermal topography from the negative 230°F at her feet to 65°F at the edge of the lava flow. Nice and balmy. The molten sulfur itself, of course, existed at higher ambient temperatures. It lay dead in her way. *** They'd named it Lake Styx. Martha spent half an hour muttering over her topo maps, trying to figure out how she'd gone so far astray. Not that it wasn't obvious. All that stumbling around. Little errors that she'd made, adding up. A tendency to favor one leg over the other. It had been an iffy thing from the beginning, trying to navigate by dead reckoning. Finally, though, it was obvious. Here she was. On the shores of Lake Styx. Not all that far off course after all. Three miles, maybe, tops. Despair filled her.

They'd named the lake during their first loop through the Galilean system, what the engineers had called the "mapping run." It was one of the largest features they'd seen that wasn't already on the maps from satellite probes or Earth-based reconnaissance. Hols had thought it might be a new phenomenon— a lake that had achieved its current size within the past ten years or so. Burton had thought it would be fun to check it out. And Martha hadn't cared, so long as she wasn't left behind. So they'd added the lake to their itinerary. She had been so transparently eager to be in on the first landing, so afraid that she'd be left behind, that when she suggested they match fingers, odd man out, for who stayed, both Burton and Hols had laughed. "I'll play mother," Hols had said magnanimously, "for the first landing. Burton for Ganymede and then you for Europa. Fair enough?" And ruffled her hair. She'd been so relieved, and so grateful, and so humiliated too. It was ironic. Now it looked like Hols— who would never have gotten so far off course as to go down the wrong side of the Styx— wasn't going to get to touch rock at all. Not this expedition. "Stupid, stupid, stupid," Martha muttered, though she didn't know if she were condemning Hols or Burton or herself. Lake Styx was horseshoe-shaped and twelve miles long. And she was standing right at the inner toe of the horseshoe. There was no way she could retrace her steps back around the lake and still get to the lander before her air ran out. The lake was dense enough that she could almost swim across it, if it weren't for the viscosity of the sulfur, which would coat her heat radiators and burn out her suit in no time flat. And the heat of the liquid. And whatever internal flows and undertows it might have. As it was, the experience would be like drowning in molasses. Slow and sticky. She sat down and began to cry. After a time she began to build up her nerve to grope for the snap-coupling to her airpack. There was a safety for it, but among those familiar with the rig it was an open secret that if you held the safety down with your thumb and yanked suddenly on the coupling, the whole thing would come undone, emptying the suit in less than a second. The gesture was so distinctive that hot young astronauts-in-training would mime it when one of their number said something particularly stupid. It was called the suicide flick. There were worse ways of dying. "Will build. Bridge. Have enough. Fine control of. Physical processes. To build. Bridge." "Yeah, right, very nice, you do that," Martha said absently. If you can't be polite to your own hallucinations ... She didn't bother finishing the thought. Little crawly things were creeping about on the surface of her skin. Best to ignore them. "Wait. Here. Rest. Now." She said nothing but only sat, not resting. Building up her courage. Thinking about everything and nothing. Clutching her knees and rocking back and forth. Eventually, without meaning to, she fell asleep.

*** "Wake. Up. Wake. Up. Wake. Up." "Uhh?" Martha struggled up into awareness. Something was happening before her, out on the lake. Physical processes were at work. Things were moving. As she watched, the white crust at the edge of the dark lake bulged outward, shooting out crystals, extending. Lacy as a snowflake. Pale as frost. Reaching across the molten blackness. Until there was a narrow white bridge stretching all the way to the far shore. "You must. Wait," Io said. "Ten minutes and. You can. Walk across. It. With ease." "Son of a bitch!" Martha murmured. "I'm sane." *** In wondering silence, she crossed the bridge that Io had enchanted across the dark lake. Once or twice the surface felt a little mushy underfoot, but it always held. It was an exalting experience. Like passing over from Death into Life. At the far side of the Styx, the pyroclastic plains rose gently toward a distant horizon. She stared up yet another long, crystal-flower-covered slope. Two in one day. What were the odds against that? She struggled upward, flowers exploding as they were touched by her boots. At the top of the rise, the flowers gave way to sulfur hardpan again. Looking back, she could see the path she had crunched through the flowers begin to erase itself. For a long moment she stood still, venting heat. Crystals shattered soundlessly about her in a slowly expanding circle. She was itching something awful now. Time to freshen up. Six quick taps brought up a message on her visor: Warning: Continued use of this drug at current levels can result in paranoia, psychosis, hallucinations, misperceptions, and hypomania, as well as impaired judgment. Fuck that noise. Martha dealt herself another hit. It took a few seconds. Then— whoops. She was feeling light and full of energy again. Best check the airpack reading. Man, that didn't look good. She had to giggle. Which was downright scary. Nothing could have sobered her up faster than that high little druggie laugh. It terrified her. Her life depended on her ability to maintain. She had to keep taking meth to keep going, but she also had to keep going under the drug. She couldn't let it start calling the shots. Focus. Time to switch over to the last airpack. Burton's airpack. "I've got eight hours of oxygen left. I've got twelve miles yet to go. It can be done," she said grimly. "I'm going to do it now."

If only her skin weren't itching. If only her head weren't crawling. If only her brain weren't busily expanding in all directions. Trudge, drag, trudge, drag. All through the night. The trouble with repetitive labor was that it gave you time to think. Time to think when you were speeding also meant time to think about the quality of your own thought. You didn't dream in real-time, she'd been told. You get it all in one flash, just as you're about to wake up, and in that instant extrapolate a complex dream all in one whole. It feels as if you've been dreaming for hours. But you've only had one split second of intense nonreality. Maybe that's what's happening here. She had a job to do. She had to keep a clear head. It was important that she get back to the lander. People had to know. They weren't alone anymore. Damnit, she'd just made the biggest discovery since fire! Either that, or she was so crazy she was hallucinating that Io was a gigantic alien machine. So crazy she'd lost herself within the convolutions of her own brain. Which was another terrifying thing she wished she hadn't thought of. She'd been a loner as a child. Never made friends easily. Never had or been a best friend to anybody. Had spent half her girlhood buried in books. Solipsism terrified her— she'd lived right on the edge of it for too long. So it was vitally important that she determine whether the voice of Io had an objective, external reality. Or not. Well, how could she test it? Sulfur was triboelectric, Io had said. Implying that it was in some way an electrical phenomenon. If so, then it ought to be physically demonstrable. Martha directed her helmet to show her the electrical charges within the sulfur plains. Crank it up to the max. The land before her flickered once, then lit up in fairyland colors. Light! Pale oceans of light overlaying light, shifting between pastels, from faded rose to boreal blue, multilayered, labyrinthine, and all pulsing gently within the heart of the sulfur rock. It looked like thought made visual. It looked like something straight out of Disney Virtual, and not one of the nature channels either— definitely DV-3. "Damn," she muttered. Right under her nose. She'd had no idea. Glowing lines veined the warping wings of subterranean electromagnetic forces. Almost like circuit wires. They crisscrossed the plains in all directions, combining and then converging— not upon her, but in a nexus at the sled. Burton's corpse was lit up like neon. Her head, packed in sulfur dioxide snow, strobed and stuttered with light so rapidly that it shone like the sun. Sulfur was triboelectric. Which meant that it built up a charge when rubbed. She'd been dragging Burton's sledge over the sulfur surface of Io for how many hours? You could build up a hell of a charge that way.

So, okay. There was a physical mechanism for what she was seeing. Assuming that Io really was a machine, a triboelectric alien device the size of Earth's moon, built eons ago for who knows what purpose by who knows what godlike monstrosities, then, yes, it might be able to communicate with her. A lot could be done with electricity. Lesser, smaller, and dimmer "circuitry" reached for Martha as well. She looked down at her feet. When she lifted one from the surface, the contact was broken, and the lines of force collapsed. Other lines were born when she put her foot down again. Whatever slight contact might be made was being constantly broken. Whereas Burton's sledge was in constant contact with the sulfur surface of Io. That hole in Burton's skull would be a highway straight into her brain. And she'd packed it in solid SO2 as well. Conductive and supercooled. She'd made things easy for Io. She shifted back to augmented real-color. The DV-3 SFX faded away. Accepting as a tentative hypothesis that the voice was a real rather than a psychological phenomenon. That Io was able to communicate with her. That it was a machine. That it had been built ... Who, then, had built it? Click. "Io? Are you listening?" "Calm on the listening ear of night. Come Heaven's melodious strains. Edmund Hamilton Sears." "Yeah, wonderful, great. Listen, there's something I'd kinda like to know— who built you?" "You Did." Slyly, Martha said, "So I'm your creator, right?" "Yes." "What do I look like when I'm at home?" "Whatever. You wish. To." "Do I breathe oxygen? Methane? Do I have antennae? Tentacles? Wings? How many legs do I have? How many eyes? How many heads?" "If. You wish. As many as. You wish." "How many of me are there?" "One." A pause. "Now." "I was here before, right? People like me. Mobile intelligent life-forms. And I left. How long have I been gone?"

Silence. "How long—" she began again. "Long time. Lonely. So very. Long time." *** Trudge, drag. Trudge, drag. Trudge, drag. How many centuries had she been walking? Felt like a lot. It was night again. Her arms felt like they were going to fall out of their sockets. Really, she ought to leave Burton behind. She'd never said anything to make Martha think she cared one way or the other where her body wound up. Probably would've thought a burial on Io was pretty damn nifty. But Martha wasn't doing this for her. She was doing it for herself. To prove that she wasn't entirely selfish. That she did too have feelings for others. That she was motivated by more than just the desire for fame and glory. Which, of course, was a sign of selfishness in itself. The desire to be known as selfless. It was hopeless. You could nail yourself to a fucking cross, and it would still be proof of your innate selfishness. "You still there, Io?" Click. "Am. Listening." "Tell me about this fine control of yours. How much do you have? Can you bring me to the lander faster than I'm going now? Can you bring the lander to me? Can you return me to the orbiter? Can you provide me with more oxygen?" "Dead egg, I lie. Whole. On a whole world I cannot touch. Plath." "You're not much use, then, are you?" There was no answer. Not that she had expected one. Or needed it, either. She checked the topos and found herself another eighth-mile closer to the lander. She could even see it now under her helmet photomultipliers, a dim glint upon the horizon. Wonderful things, photomultipliers. The sun here provided about as much light as a full moon did back on Earth. Jupiter by itself provided even less. Yet crank up the magnification, and she could see the airlock awaiting the grateful touch of her gloved hand. Trudge, drag, trudge. Martha ran and reran and rereran the math in her head. She had only three miles to go, and enough oxygen for as many hours. The lander had its own air supply. She was going to make it. Maybe she wasn't the total loser she'd always thought she was. Maybe there was hope for her, after all. Click. "Brace. Yourself." "What for?"

The ground rose up beneath her and knocked her off her feet. *** When the shaking stopped, Martha clambered unsteadily to her feet again. The land before her was all a jumble, as if a careless deity had lifted the entire plain up a foot and then dropped it. The silvery glint of the lander on the horizon was gone. When she pushed her helmet's magnification to the max, she could see a metal leg rising crookedly from the rubbled ground. Martha knew the shear strength of every bolt and failure point of every welding seam in the lander. She knew exactly how fragile it was. That was one device that was never going to fly again. She stood motionless. Unblinking. Unseeing. Feeling nothing. Nothing at all. Eventually she pulled herself together enough to think. Maybe it was time to admit it: She never had believed she was going to make it. Not really. Not Martha Kivelsen. All her life she'd been a loser. Sometimes— like when she qualified for the expedition— she lost at a higher level than usual. But she never got whatever it was she really wanted. Why was that, she wondered? When had she ever desired anything bad? When you get right down to it, all she'd ever wanted was to kick God in the butt and get his attention. To be a big noise. To be the biggest fucking noise in the universe. Was that so unreasonable? Now she was going to wind up as a footnote in the annals of humanity's expansion into space. A sad little cautionary tale for mommy astronauts to tell their baby astronauts on cold winter nights. Maybe Burton could've gotten back to the lander. Or Hols. But not her. It just wasn't in the cards. Click. "Io is the most volcanically active body in the solar system." "You fucking bastard! Why didn't you warn me?" "Did. Not. Know." Now her emotions returned to her in full force. She wanted to run and scream and break things. Only there wasn't anything in sight that hadn't already been broken. "You shithead!" she cried. "You idiot machine! What use are you? What goddamn use at all?" "Can give you. Eternal life. Communion of the soul. Unlimited processing power. Can give Burton. Same." "Hah?" "After the first death. There is no other. Dylan Thomas." "What do you mean by that?"

Silence. "Damn you, you fucking machine! What are you trying to say?" *** Then the devil took Jesus up into the holy city and set him on the highest point of the temple, and said to him, "If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down: for it is written he shall give his angels charge concerning thee: and in their hands they shall bear thee up." Burton wasn't the only one who could quote scripture. You didn't have to be Catholic, like her. Presbyterians could do it too. Martha wasn't sure what you'd call this feature. A volcanic phenomenon of some sort. It wasn't very big. Maybe twenty meters across, not much higher. Call it a crater, and let be. She stood shivering at its lip. There was a black pool of molten sulfur at its bottom, just as she'd been told. Supposedly its roots reached all the way down to Tartarus. Her head ached so badly. Io claimed— had said— that if she threw herself in, it would be able to absorb her, duplicate her neural patterning, and so restore her to life. A transformed sort of life, but life nonetheless. "Throw Burton in," it had said. "Throw yourself in. Physical configuration will be. Destroyed. Neural configuration will be. Preserved. Maybe." "Maybe?" "Burton had limited. Biological training. Understanding of neural functions may be. Imperfect." "Wonderful." "Or. Maybe not." "Gotcha." Heat radiated up from the bottom of the crater. Even protected and shielded as she was by her suit's HVAC systems, she felt the difference between front and back. It was like standing in front of a fire on a very cold night. They had talked, or maybe negotiated was a better word for it, for a long time. Finally Martha had said, "You savvy Morse code? You savvy orthodox spelling?" "Whatever Burton. Understood. Is. Understood." "Yes or no, damnit!" "Savvy."

"Good. Then maybe we can make a deal." *** She stared up into the night. The orbiter was out there somewhere, and she was sorry she couldn't talk directly to Hols, say good-bye and thanks for everything. But Io had said no. What she planned would raise volcanoes and level mountains. The devastation would dwarf that of the earthquake caused by the bridge across Lake Styx. It couldn't guarantee two separate communications. The ion flux tube arched from somewhere over the horizon in a great looping jump to the north pole of Jupiter. Augmented by her visor, it was as bright as the sword of God. As she watched, it began to sputter and jump, millions of watts of power dancing staccato in a message they'd be picking up on the surface of Earth. It would swamp every radio and drown out every broadcast in the Solar System. THIS IS MARTHA KIVELSEN, SPEAKING FROM THE SURFACE OF IO ON BEHALF OF MYSELF, JULIET BURTON, DECEASED, AND JACOB HOLS, OF THE FIRST GALILEAN SATELLITES EXPLORATORY MISSION. WE HAVE MADE AN IMPORTANT DISCOVERY.... Every electrical device in the System would dance to its song! *** Burton went first. Martha gave the sledge a shove, and out it flew, into empty space. It dwindled, hit, kicked up a bit of a splash. Then, with a disappointing lack of pyrotechnics, the corpse slowly sank into the black glop. It didn't look very encouraging at all. Still ... "Okay," she said. "A deal's a deal." She dug in her toes and spread her arms. Took a deep breath. Maybe I am going to survive after all, she thought. It could be Burton was already halfway-merged into the oceanic mind of Io, and awaiting her to join in an alchemical marriage of personalities. Maybe I'm going to live forever. Who knows? Anything is possible. Maybe. There was a second and more likely possibility. All this could well be nothing more than a hallucination. Nothing but the sound of her brain short-circuiting and squirting bad chemicals in all directions. Madness. One last grandiose dream before dying. Martha had no way of judging.

Whatever the truth might be, though, there were no alternatives, and only one way to find out. She jumped. Briefly, she flew. Story Of Your Life TED CHIANG Here's an intricate, intelligent, and compassionate look at the proposition that knowing how a story ends before you start it sometimes doesn't matter as much as what you learn along the way.... Ted Chiang has made a big impact on the field with only a handful of stories, published in Omni, Asimov's Science Fiction, Full Spectrum 3, and Starlight 2. He won the 1990 Nebula Award with his first published story, "Tower of Babylon," which was in our Eighth Annual Collection, and won the 1991 Asimov's Readers Award with his third, "Understand," as well as winning the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in that same year. Little has been heard from him since 1991, but now he's back with a vengeance with "Story of Your Life," which, amazingly, is only his fourth published story. It will be very interesting to see what he writes in the years to come; he could well turn out to be one of the significant new talents of the new century ahead. He lives in Kirkland, Washington. Your father is about to ask me the question. This is the most important moment in our lives, and I want to pay attention, note every detail. Your dad and I have just come back from an evening out, dinner and a show; it's after midnight. We came out onto the patio to look at the full moon; then I told your dad I wanted to dance, so he humors me and now we're slow-dancing, a pair of thirtysomething swaying back and forth in the moonlight like kids. I don't feel the night chill at all. And then your dad says, "Do you want to make a baby?" Right now your dad and I have been married for about two years, living on Ellis Avenue; when we move out you'll still be too young to remember the house, but we'll show you pictures of it, tell you stories about it. I'd love to tell you the story of this evening, the night you're conceived, but the right time to do that would be when you're ready to have children of your own, and we'll never get that chance. Telling it to you any earlier wouldn't do any good; for most of your life you won't sit still to hear such a romantic— you'd say sappy— story. I remember the scenario of your origin you'll suggest when you're twelve. "The only reason you had me was so you could get a maid you wouldn't have to pay," you'll say bitterly, dragging the vacuum cleaner out of the closet. "That's right," I'll say. "Thirteen years ago I knew the carpets would need vacuuming around now, and having a baby seemed to be the cheapest and easiest way to get the job done. Now kindly get on with it." "If you weren't my mother, this would be illegal," you'll say, seething as you unwind the power cord and plug it into the wall outlet.

That will be in the house on Belmont Street. I'll live to see strangers occupy both houses: the one you're conceived in and the one you grow up in. Your dad and I will sell the first a couple years after your arrival. I'll sell the second shortly after your departure. By then Nelson and I will have moved into our farmhouse, and your dad will be living with what's-her-name. I know how this story ends; I think about it a lot. I also think a lot about how it began, just a few years ago, when ships appeared in orbit and artifacts appeared in meadows. The government said next to nothing about them, while the tabloids said every possible thing. And then I got a phone call, a request for a meeting. *** I spotted them waiting in the hallway, outside my office. They made an odd couple; one wore a military uniform and a crewcut, and carried an aluminum briefcase. He seemed to be assessing his surroundings with a critical eye. The other one was easily identifiable as an academic: full beard and mustache, wearing corduroy. He was browsing through the overlapping sheets stapled to a bulletin board nearby. "Colonel Weber, I presume?" I shook hands with the soldier. "Louise Banks." "Dr. Banks. Thank you for taking the time to speak with us," he said. "Not at all; any excuse to avoid the faculty meeting." Colonel Weber indicated his companion. "This is Dr. Gary Donnelly, the physicist I mentioned when we spoke on the phone." "Call me Gary," he said as we shook hands. "I'm anxious to hear what you have to say." We entered my office. I moved a couple of stacks of books off the second guest chair, and we all sat down. "You said you wanted me to listen to a recording. I presume this has something to do with the aliens?" "All I can offer is the recording," said Colonel Weber. "Okay, let's hear it." Colonel Weber took a tape machine out of his briefcase and pressed play. The recording sounded vaguely like that of a wet dog shaking the water out of its fur. "What do you make of that?" he asked. I withheld my comparison to a wet dog. "What was the context in which this recording was made?" "I'm not at liberty to say." "It would help me interpret those sounds. Could you see the alien while it was speaking? Was it doing

anything at the time?" "The recording is all I can offer." "You won't be giving anything away if you tell me that you've seen the aliens; the public's assumed you have." Colonel Weber wasn't budging. "Do you have any opinion about its linguistic properties?" he asked. "Well, it's clear that their vocal tract is substantially different from a human vocal tract. I assume that these aliens don't look like humans?" The colonel was about to say something noncommittal when Gary Donelly asked, "Can you make any guesses based on the tape?" "Not really. It doesn't sound like they're using a larynx to make those sounds, but that doesn't tell me what they look like." "Anything— is there anything else you can call tell us?" asked Colonel Weber. I could see he wasn't accustomed to consulting a civilian. "Only that establishing communications is going to be really difficult because of the difference in anatomy. They're almost certainly using sounds that the human vocal tract can't reproduce, and maybe sounds that the human ear can't distinguish." "You mean infra- or ultrasonic frequencies?" asked Gary Donnelly. "Not specifically. I just mean that the human auditory system isn't an absolute acoustic instrument; it's optimized to recognize the sounds that a human larynx makes. With an alien vocal system, all bets are off." I shrugged. "Maybe we'll be able to hear the difference between alien phonemes, given enough practice, but it's possible our ears simply can't recognize the distinctions they consider meaningful. In that case we'd need a sound spectrograph to know what an alien is saying." Colonel Weber asked, "Suppose I gave you an hour's worth of recordings; how long would it take you to determine if we need this sound spectrograph or not?" "I couldn't determine that with just a recording no matter how much time I had. I'd need to talk with the aliens directly." The colonel shook his head. "Not possible." I tried to break it to him gently. "That's your call, of course. But the only way to learn an unknown language is to interact with a native speaker, and by that I mean asking questions, holding a conversation, that sort of thing. Without that, it's simply not possible. So if you want to learn the aliens' language, someone with training in field linguistics— whether it's me or someone else— will have to talk with an alien. Recordings alone aren't sufficient." Colonel Weber frowned. "You seem to be implying that no alien could have learned human languages by monitoring our broadcasts." "I doubt it. They'd need instructional material specifically designed to teach human languages to

nonhumans. Either that, or interaction with a human. If they had either of those, they could learn a lot from TV, but otherwise, they wouldn't have a starting point." The colonel clearly found this interesting; evidently his philosophy was, the less the aliens knew, the better. Gary Donnelly read the colonel's expression too and rolled his eyes. I suppressed a smile. Then Colonel Weber asked, "Suppose you were learning a new language by talking to its speakers; could you do it without teaching them English?" "That would depend on how cooperative the native speakers were. They'd almost certainly pick up bits and pieces while I'm learning their language, but it wouldn't have to be much if they're willing to teach. On the other hand, if they'd rather learn English than teach us their language, that would make things far more difficult." The colonel nodded. "I'll get back to you on this matter." *** The request for that meeting was perhaps the second most momentous phone call in my life. The first, of course, will be the one from Mountain Rescue. At that point your dad and I will be speaking to each other maybe once a year, tops. After I get that phone call, though, the first thing I'll do will be to call your father. He and I will drive out together to perform the identification, a long silent car ride. I remember the morgue, all tile and stainless steel, the hum of refrigeration and smell of antiseptic. An orderly will pull the sheet back to reveal your face. Your face will look wrong somehow, but I'll know it's you. "Yes, that's her," I'll say. "She's mine." You'll be twenty-five then. *** The MP checked my badge, made a notation on his clipboard, and opened the gate; I drove the off-road vehicle into the encampment, a small village of tents pitched by the Army in a farmer's sun-scorched pasture. At the center of the encampment was one of the alien devices, nicknamed "looking glasses." According to the briefings I'd attended, there were nine of these in the United States, one hundred and twelve in the world. The looking glasses acted as two-way communication devices, presumably with the ships in orbit. No one knew why the aliens wouldn't talk to us in person; fear of cooties, maybe. A team of scientists, including a physicist and a linguist, was assigned to each looking glass; Gary Donnelly and I were on this one. Gary was waiting for me in the parking area. We navigated a circular maze of concrete barricades until we reached the large tent that covered the looking glass itself. In front of the tent was an equipment cart loaded with goodies borrowed from the school's phonology lab; I had sent it ahead for inspection by the Army.

Also outside the tent were three tripod-mounted video cameras whose lenses peered, through windows in the fabric wall, into the main room. Everything Gary and I did would be reviewed by countless others, including military intelligence. In addition we would each send daily reports, of which mine had to include estimates on how much English I thought the aliens could understand. Gary held open the tent flap and gestured for me to enter. "Step right up," he said, circus-barker-style. "Marvel at creatures the likes of which have never been seen on God's green earth." "And all for one slim dime," I murmured, walking through the door. At the moment the looking glass was inactive, resembling a semicircular mirror over ten feet high and twenty feet across. On the brown grass in front of the looking glass, an arc of white spray paint outlined the activation area. Currently the area contained only a table, two folding chairs, and a power strip with a cord leading to a generator outside. The buzz of fluorescent lamps, hung from poles along the edge of the room, commingled with the buzz of flies in the sweltering heat. Gary and I looked at each other, and then began pushing the cart of equipment up to the table. As we crossed the paint line, the looking glass appeared to grow transparent; it was as if someone was slowly raising the illumination behind tinted glass. The illusion of depth was uncanny; I felt I could walk right into it. Once the looking glass was fully lit it resembled a life-sized diorama of a semicircular room. The room contained a few large objects that might have been furniture, but no aliens. There was a door in the curved rear wall. We busied ourselves connecting everything together: microphone, sound spectrograph, portable computer, and speaker. As we worked, I frequently glanced at the looking glass, anticipating the aliens' arrival. Even so I jumped when one of them entered. It looked like a barrel suspended at the intersection of seven limbs. It was radially symmetric, and any of its limbs could serve as an arm or a leg. The one in front of me was walking around on four legs, three nonadjacent arms curled up at its sides. Gary called them "heptapods." I'd been shown videotapes, but I still gawked. Its limbs had no distinct joints; anatomists guessed they might be supported by vertebral columns. Whatever their underlying structure, the heptapod's limbs conspired to move it in a disconcertingly fluid manner. Its "torso" rode atop the rippling limbs as smoothly as a hovercraft. Seven lidless eyes ringed the top of the heptapod's body. It walked back to the doorway from which it entered, made a brief sputtering sound, and returned to the center of the room followed by another heptapod; at no point did it ever turn around. Eerie, but logical; with eyes on all sides, any direction might as well be "forward." Gary had been watching my reaction. "Ready?" he asked. I took a deep breath. "Ready enough." I'd done plenty of fieldwork before, in the Amazon, but it had always been a bilingual procedure: either my informants knew some Portuguese, which I could use, or I'd previously gotten an introduction to their language from the local missionaries. This would be my first attempt at conducting a true monolingual discovery procedure. It was straightforward enough in theory, though. I walked up to the looking glass and a heptapod on the other side did the same. The image was so real

that my skin crawled. I could see the texture of its gray skin, like corduroy ridges arranged in whorls and loops. There was no smell at all from the looking glass, which somehow made the situation stranger. I pointed to myself and said slowly, "Human." Then I pointed to Gary. "Human." Then I pointed at each heptapod and said, "What are you?" No reaction. I tried again, and then again. One of the heptapods pointed to itself with one limb, the four terminal digits pressed together. That was lucky. In some cultures a person pointed with his chin; if the heptapod hadn't used one of its limbs, I wouldn't have known what gesture to look for. I heard a brief fluttering sound, and saw a puckered orifice at the top of its body vibrate; it was talking. Then it pointed to its companion and fluttered again. I went back to my computer; on its screen were two virtually identical spectrographs representing the fluttering sounds. I marked a sample for playback. I pointed to myself and said "Human" again, and did the same with Gary. Then I pointed to the heptapod, and played back the flutter on the speaker. The heptapod fluttered some more. The second half of the spectrograph for this utterance looked like a repetition: call the previous utterances [flutter1], then this one was [flutter2flutter1]. I pointed at something that might have been a heptapod chair. "What is that?" The heptapod paused, and then pointed at the "chair" and talked some more. The spectrograph for this differed distinctly from that of the earlier sounds: [flutter3]. Once again, I pointed to the "chair" while playing back [flutter3]. The heptapod replied; judging by the spectrograph, it looked like [flutter3flutter2]. Optimistic interpretation: the heptapod was confirming my utterances as correct, which implied compatibility between heptapod and human patterns of discourse. Pessimistic interpretation: it had a nagging cough. At my computer I delimited certain sections of the spectrograph and typed in a tentative gloss for each: "heptapod" for [flutter1], "yes" for [flutter2], and "chair" for [flutter3]. Then I typed "Language: Heptapod A" as a heading for all the utterances. Gary watched what I was typing. "What's the 'A' for?" "It just distinguishes this language from any other ones the heptapods might use," I said. He nodded. "Now let's try something, just for laughs." I pointed at each heptapod and tried to mimic the sound of [flutter1]; "heptapod." After a long pause, the first heptapod said something and then the second one said something else, neither of whose spectrographs resembled anything said before. I couldn't tell if they were speaking to each other or to me since they had no faces to turn. I tried pronouncing [flutter1] again, but there was no reaction. "Not even close," I grumbled. "I'm impressed you can make sounds like that at all," said Gary. "You should hear my moose call. Sends them running."

I tried again a few more times, but neither heptapod responded with anything I could recognize. Only when I replayed the recording of the heptapod's pronunciation did I get a confirmation; the heptapod replied with [flutter2], "yes." "So we're stuck with using recordings?" asked Gary. I nodded. "At least temporarily." "So now what?" "Now we make sure it hasn't actually been saying 'aren't they cute' or 'look what they're doing now.' Then we see if we can identify any of these words when that other heptapod pronounces them." I gestured for him to have a seat. "Get comfortable; this'll take a while." *** In 1770, Captain Cook's ship Endeavour ran aground on the coast of Queensland, Australia. While some of his men made repairs, Cook led an exploration party and met the aboriginal people. One of the sailors pointed to the animals that hopped around with their young riding in pouches, and asked an aborigine what they were called. The aborigine replied, "Kanguru." From then on Cook and his sailors referred to the animals by this word. It wasn't until later that they learned it meant "What did you say?" I tell that story in my introductory course every year. It's almost certainly untrue, and I explain that afterwards, but it's a classic anecdote. Of course, the anecdotes my undergraduates will really want to hear are ones featuring the heptapods; for the rest of my teaching career, that'll be the reason many of them sign up for my courses. So I'll show them the old videotapes of my sessions at the looking glass, and the sessions that the other linguists conducted; the tapes are instructive, and they'll be useful if we're ever visited by aliens again, but they don't generate many good anecdotes. When it comes to language-learning anecdotes, my favorite source is child language acquisition. I remember one afternoon when you are five years old, after you have come home from kindergarten. You'll be coloring with your crayons while I grade papers. "Mom," you'll say, using the carefully casual tone reserved for requesting a favor, "can I ask you something?" "Sure, sweetie. Go ahead." "Can I be, um, honored?" I'll look up from the paper I'm grading. "What do you mean?" "At school Sharon said she got to be honored." "Really? Did she tell you what for?" "It was when her big sister got married. She said only one person could be, um, honored, and she was it."

"Ah, I see. You mean Sharon was maid of honor?" "Yeah, that's it. Can I be made of honor?" *** Gary and I entered the prefab building containing the center of operations for the looking glass site. Inside it looked like they were planning an invasion, or perhaps an evacuation: crewcut soldiers worked around a large map of the area, or sat in front of burly electronic gear while speaking into headsets. We were shown into Colonel Weber's office, a room in the back that was cool from air conditioning. We briefed the colonel on our first day's results. "Doesn't sound like you got very far," he said. "I have an idea as to how we can make faster progress," I said. "But you'll have to approve the use of more equipment." "What more do you need?" "A digital camera, and a big video screen." I showed him a drawing of the setup I imagined. "I want to try conducting the discovery procedure using writing; I'd display words on the screen, and use the camera to record the words they write. I'm hoping the heptapods will do the same." Weber looked at the drawing dubiously. "What would be the advantage of that?" "So far I've been proceeding the way I would with speakers of an unwritten language. Then it occurred to me that the heptapods must have writing, too." "So?" "If the heptapods have a mechanical way of producing writing, then their writing ought to be very regular, very consistent. That would make it easier for us to identify graphemes instead of phonemes. It's like picking out the letters in a printed sentence instead of trying to hear them when the sentence is spoken aloud." "I take your point," he admitted. "And how would you respond to them? Show them the words they displayed to you?" "Basically. And if they put spaces between words, any sentences we write would be a lot more intelligible than any spoken sentence we might splice together from recordings." He leaned back in his chair. "You know we want to show as little of our technology as possible." "I understand, but we're using machines as intermediaries already. If we can get them to use writing, I believe progress will go much faster than if we're restricted to the sound spectrographs." The colonel turned to Gary. "Your opinion?"

"It sounds like a good idea to me. I'm curious whether the heptapods might have difficulty reading our monitors. Their looking glasses are based on a completely different technology than our video screens. As far as we can tell, they don't use pixels or scan lines, and they don't refresh on a frame-by-frame basis." "You think the scan lines on our video screens might render them unreadable to the heptapods?" "It's possible," said Gary. "We'll just have to try it and see." Weber considered it. For me it wasn't even a question, but from his point of view it was a difficult one; like a soldier, though, he made it quickly. "Request granted. Talk to the sergeant outside about bringing in what you need. Have it ready for tomorrow." *** I remember one day during the summer when you're sixteen. For once, the person waiting for her date to arrive is me. Of course, you'll be waiting around, too, curious to see what he looks like. You'll have a friend of yours, a blond girl with the unlikely name of Roxie, hanging out with you, giggling. "You may feel the urge to make comments about him," I'll say, checking myself in the hallway mirror. "Just restrain yourselves until we leave." "Don't worry, Mom," you'll say. "We'll do it so that he won't know. Roxie, you ask me what I think the weather will be like tonight. Then I'll say what I think of Mom's date." "Right," Roxie will say. "No, you most definitely will not," I'll say. "Relax, Mom. He'll never know; we do this all the time." "What a comfort that is." A little later on, Nelson will arrive to pick me up. I'll do the introductions, and we'll all engage in a little small talk on the front porch. Nelson is ruggedly handsome, to your evident approval. Just as we're about to leave, Roxie will say to you casually, "So what do you think the weather will be like tonight?" "I think it's going to be really hot," you'll answer. Roxie will nod in agreement. Nelson will say, "Really? I thought they said it was going to be cool." "I have a sixth sense about these things," you'll say. Your face will give nothing away. "I get the feeling it's going to be a scorcher. Good thing you're dressed for it, Mom." I'll glare at you, and say good night. As I lead Nelson toward his car, he'll ask me, amused, "I'm missing something here, aren't I?"

"A private joke," I'll mutter. "Don't ask me to explain it." *** At our next session at the looking glass, we repeated the procedure we had performed before, this time displaying a printed word on our computer screen at the same time we spoke: showing human while saying "Human," and so forth. Eventually, the heptapods understood what we wanted, and set up a flat circular screen mounted on a small pedestal. One heptapod spoke, and then inserted a limb into a large socket in the pedestal; a doodle of script, vaguely cursive, popped onto the screen. We soon settled into a routine, and I compiled two parallel corpora: one of spoken utterances, one of writing samples. Based on first impressions, their writing appeared to be logographic, which was disappointing; I'd been hoping for an alphabetic script to help us learn their speech. Their logograms might include some phonetic information, but finding it would be a lot harder than with an alphabetic script. By getting up close to the looking glass, I was able to point to various heptapod body parts, such as limbs, digits, and eyes, and elicit terms for each. It turned out that they had an orifice on the underside of their body, lined with articulated bony ridges: probably used for eating, while the one at the top was for respiration and speech. There were no other conspicuous orifices; perhaps their mouth was their anus, too. Those sorts of questions would have to wait. I also tried asking our two informants for terms for addressing each individually; personal names, if they had such things. Their answers were of course unpronounceable, so for Gary's and my purposes, I dubbed them Flapper and Raspberry. I hoped I'd be able to tell them apart. *** The next day I conferred with Gary before we entered the looking-glass tent. "I'll need your help with this session," I told him. "Sure. What do you want me to do?" "We need to elicit some verbs, and it's easiest with third-person forms. Would you act out a few verbs while I type the written form on the computer? If we're lucky, the heptapods will figure out what we're doing and do the same. I've brought a bunch of props for you to use." "No problem," said Gary, cracking his knuckles. "Ready when you are." We began with some simple intransitive verbs: walking, jumping, speaking, writing. Gary demonstrated each one with a charming lack of self-consciousness; the presence of the video cameras didn't inhibit him at all. For the first few actions he performed, I asked the heptapods, "What do you call that?" Before long, the heptapods caught on to what we were trying to do; Raspberry began mimicking Gary, or at least performing the equivalent heptapod action, while Flapper worked their computer, displaying a written description and pronouncing it aloud. In the spectrographs of their spoken utterances, I could recognize their word I had glossed as

"heptapod." The rest of each utterance was presumably the verb phrase; it looked like they had analogs of nouns and verbs, thank goodness. In their writing, however, things weren't as clear-cut. For each action, they had displayed a single logogram instead of two separate ones. At first I thought they had written something like "walks," with the subject implied. But why would Flapper say "the heptapod walks" while writing "walks," instead of maintaining parallelism? Then I noticed that some of the logograms looked like the logogram for "heptapod" with some extra strokes added to one side or another. Perhaps their verbs could be written as affixes to a noun. If so, why was Flapper writing the noun in some instances but not in others? I decided to try a transitive verb; substituting object words might clarify things. Among the props I'd brought were an apple and a slice of bread. "Okay," I said to Gary, "show them the food, and then eat some. First the apple, then the bread." Gary pointed at the Golden Delicious and then he took a bite out of it, while I displayed the "what do you call that?" expression. Then we repeated it with the slice of whole wheat. Raspberry left the room and returned with some kind of giant nut or gourd and a gelatinous ellipsoid. Raspberry pointed at the gourd while Flapper said a word and displayed a logogram. Then Raspberry brought the gourd down between its legs, a crunching sound resulted, and the gourd reemerged minus a bite; there were cornlike kernels beneath the shell. Flapper talked and displayed a large logogram on their screen. The sound spectrograph for "gourd" changed when it was used in the sentence; possibly a case marker. The logogram was odd: after some study, I could identify graphic elements that resembled the individual logograms for "heptapod" and "gourd." They looked as if they had been melted together, with several extra strokes in the mix that presumably meant "eat." Was it a multiword ligature? Next we got spoken and written names for the gelatin egg, and descriptions of the act of eating it. The sound spectrograph for "heptapod eats gelatin egg" was analyzable; "gelatin egg" bore a case marker, as expected, though the sentence's word order differed from last time. The written form, another large logogram, was another matter. This time it took much longer for me to recognize anything in it; not only were the individual logograms melted together again, it looked as if the one for "heptapod" was laid on its back, while on top of it the logogram for "gelatin egg" was standing on its head. "Uh-oh." I took another look at the writing for the simple noun-verb examples, the ones that had seemed inconsistent before. Now I realized all of them actually did contain the logogram for "heptapod"; some were rotated and distorted by being combined with the various verbs, so I hadn't recognized them at first. "You guys have got to be kidding," I muttered. "What's wrong?" asked Gary. "Their script isn't word-divided; a sentence is written by joining the logograms for the constituent words. They join the logograms by rotating and modifying them. Take a look." I showed him how the logograms were rotated. "So they can read a word with equal ease no matter how it's rotated," Gary said. He turned to look at the heptapods, impressed. "I wonder if it's a consequence of their bodies' radial symmetry: their bodies have no 'forward' direction, so maybe their writing doesn't either. Highly neat." I couldn't believe it; I was working with someone who modified the word "neat" with "highly." "It certainly is interesting," I said, "but it also means there's no easy way for us write our own sentences in their

language. We can't simply cut their sentences into individual words and recombine them; we'll have to learn the rules of their script before we can write anything legible. It's the same continuity problem we'd have had splicing together speech fragments, except applied to writing." I looked at Flapper and Raspberry in the looking glass, who were waiting for us to continue, and sighed. "You aren't going to make this easy for us, are you?" *** To be fair, the heptapods were completely cooperative. In the days that followed, they readily taught us their language without requiring us to teach them any more English. Colonel Weber and his cohorts pondered the implications of that, while I and the linguists at the other looking glasses met via video conferencing to share what we had learned about the heptapod language. The videoconferencing made for an incongruous working environment: our video screens were primitive compared to the heptapods' looking glasses, so that my colleagues seemed more remote than the aliens. The familiar was far away, while the bizarre was close at hand. It would be a while before we'd be ready to ask the heptapods why they had come, or to discuss physics well enough to ask them about their technology. For the time being, we worked on the basics: phonemics/graphemics, vocabulary, syntax. The heptapods at every looking glass were using the same language, so we were able to pool our data and coordinate our efforts. Our biggest source of confusion was the heptapods' "writing." It didn't appear to be writing at all; it looked more like a bunch of intricate graphic designs. The logograms weren't arranged in rows, or a spiral, or any linear fashion. Instead, Flapper or Raspberry would write a sentence by sticking together as many logograms as needed into a giant conglomeration. This form of writing was rem